Kifcrrsi&e  Biographical 
NUMBER  i. 


ANDREW  JACKSON 

BY 

WILLIAM  GARROTT  BROWN 


ANDREW  JACKSON 


BY 


WILLIAM  GAKROTT  BROWN 


HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN  AND  COMPANY 

Boston :  4  Park  Street ;  New  York :  11  East  Seventeenth  Street 
Chicago:  378-388  Wabash  Avenue 

(Cfce  Rtoer.gtDe 


COPYRIGHT,  1900,  BY  WILLIAM   GARROTT   BROWN 
ALL   RIGHTS   RESERVED 


CONTENTS 


CHAP. 


227627 


PAGE 


I.  THE  WAXHAWS  AND  THE  WILDERNESS         .      1 
H.  CONGBESS:  THE  BENCH:  THE  MILITIA     .        24 

III.    TOHOPEKA   AND   PENSACOLA      ....      46 

IV.  NEW  ORLEANS 69 

V.   THE  SEMINOLES  AND  THE  POLITICIANS  .        .    87 
VI.  THE  WHITE  HOUSE 118 


ANDREW  JACKSON 


THE   WAXHAWS    AND    THE   WILDERNESS 

IN  Lafayette  Square,  which  fronts  the 
White  House  at  Washington,  there  is  an 
equestrian  statue  of  a  very  thin,  long-headed 
old  man  whose  most  striking  physical  charac 
teristics  are  the  firm  chin  and  lips  and  the 
bristling,  upright  hair.  The  piece  is  not  a 
great  work  of  art,  but  it  gives  one  a  strong 
impression  of  determination,  if  not  of  pug 
nacity.  Scidptors  have  not  the  means  to 
represent  the  human  eye,  else  this  impres 
sion  might  have  been  made  stronger ;  for  the 
old  gentleman  whose  warlike  aspect  is  here 
reproduced  had  a  glance  like  a  hawk's.  He 
had,  moreover,  a  habit  of  gazing  fixedly  at 
any  one  who  attracted  his  attention.  When 


JACKSON 


he  was  angry,  as  he  was  quite  frequently, 
few  men  could  meet  his  look  with  composure. 
When  he  was  in  good  humor,  however,  as  he 
usually  was  when  he  dealt  with  his  friends, 
or  with  women  or  children,  his  eyes  could  be 
very  kindly,  and  his  grim  lips  could  part  in 
a  smile  that  was  extremely  attractive. 

Not  far  away  is  the  Treasury  building. 
Were  the  horseman  alive,  by  merely  turning 
his  head  he  could  see  its  outline  through  the 
trees.  There  is  a  tradition  in  Washington 
that  when  this  old  man  lived  in  the  White 
House,  and  Congress  voted  to  erect  a  new 
Treasury  building,  the  old  one  being  burned, 
there  was  some  question  of  the  exact  spot 
on  which  it  should  stand.  The  question  was 
put  to  him  when  he  happened  to  be  walk 
ing  near  the  western  end  of  Pennsylvania 
Avenue.  He  struck  his  cane  on  the  ground 
and  said  shortly,  "  Put  it  here,  sir,"  —  and 
there  it  stands.  Whether  or  not  the  story 
is  true,  it  is  characteristic  of  the  man  and 
in  keeping  with  the  history  of  his  times  ; 
forGvhen  Andrew  Jackson  was  President 
most  things  were  done  at  Washington  just 


THE  WAXHAWS:  THE  WILDERNESS    3 

as  he  ordered  them  to  be  done.  His 
friends  declared  that  this  was  so  because  in 
most  things  his  will  stood  for  the  will  of  the 
American  people ;  his  enemies,  that  they 
were  done  for  no  good  reason  whatever,  but 
only  because  a  despot  commanded  his  slaves 
to  do  them. 

To  this  day  there  is  the  same  division  of 
opinion.  The  historians  still  fight  the  same 
battle  over  him  and  his  doings  which  hi 
former  times  was  fought  out  by  famous  ora 
tors  in  Congress,  by  the  whole  people  at  the 
polls.  It  is  doubtful,  indeed,  if  there  ever 
will  be,  until  the  end  of  the  Republic  itself, 
an  end  of  the  dispute  over  the  place  which 
that  slender  figure  with  the  bristling  hair 
ought  to  have  in  American  history.  Had 
Andrew  Jackson  any  good  claim  to  statues 
and  monuments,  to  the  first  place  in  the 
Republic,  to  popularity  such  as  no  other 
man  had  enjoyed  since  Washington,  to  power 
such  as  Washington  himself  had  never  exer 
cised?  Did  he  prove  himself  worthy  of  the 
place  and  power  he  held  ?  To  answer  either 
yes  or  no  with  assurance  one  must  patiently 


4  ANDREW  JACKSON 

examine  more  books  than  Andrew  Jackson 
ever  glanced  through  in  his  whole  life.  This 
little  book  would  hardly  contain  the  full 
titles  of  them  all.  Yet  it  may  perhaps  be 
large  enough  to  let  the  reader  see  what  man 
ner  of  man  he  was  concerning  whom  so  many 
bitter  controversies  have  raged.  Perhaps  it 
may  serve  to  explain  how  a  Scotch-Irish  boy, 
born  to  the  deepest  obscurity  and  the  wretch- 
edest  poverty,  and  blessed,  apparently,  with 
no  remarkable  gifts  of  mind  or  body,  came 
to  have  statues  carved  in  his  honor,  towns 
and  counties  and  cities  named  for  him, 
long  books  written  about  him,  a  great  party 
organized  to  do  his  bidding,  the  whole  coun 
try  time  and  again  divided  into  those  who 
were  for  him  and  those  who  were  against 
him. 

It  is  quite  important,  as  Mr.  Parton,  the 
most  painstaking  of  all  his  biographers,  often 
observes,  that  this  particular  poor  boy  was  of 
Scotch-Irish  stock.  That  stock  is  again  and 
again  conspicuous  in  American  history,  and 
Andrew  Jackson  was  in  many  respects  the 


THE  WAXHAWS:  THE  WILDERNESS    5 

most  thoroughly  representative  Scotch-Irish 
man  of  all  the  notable  Americans  who  can 
trace  their  descent  to  the  North  of  Ireland. 
Indeed,  it  may  be  said  that  he  narrowly  es 
caped  being  born  in  the  North  of  Ireland, 
for  his  parents  were  living  at  Carrickfer- 
gus  until  two  years  before  his  birth.  They 
landed  in  America  in  1765,  and  made  their 
home  in  a  Scotch-Irish  settlement,  the  Wax- 
haws,  on  the  boundary  line  between  the  two 
Carolinas.  Andrew  Jackson,  the  father, 
and  Elizabeth  Hutchinson,  the  mother,  were 
married  and  had  two  sons  before  they  left 
Carrickfergus.  They  were  poor,  and  doubt 
less  came  to  America  for  no  other  reason 
than  to  better  their  fortunes.  They  were 
still  very  poor  when,  in  the  early  spring  of 
the  year  1767,  the  husband  died.  A  few 
days  later,  March  15,  a  son  was  born  to 
the  widowed  Elizabeth,  and  she  named  him 
Andrew.  He  himself  in  after  years  said 
that  his  birthplace  was  to  the  south  of  the 
state  line,  and  called  South  Carolina  his 
native  State ;  but  Mr.  Parton's  industrious 
researches  make  it  seem  more  probable  that 


6  ANDREW  JACKSON 

the  small  log-house  in  which  he  was  born 
was  north  of  the  line,  in  Union  County, 
North  Carolina. 

The  question  is  of  less  importance  than 
the  fact,  of  which  there  is  no  question,  that 
he  was  born  to  the  humblest  circumstances 
in  a  new  settlement  of  a  new  country,  ana 
that  his  childhood  and  boyhood  were  passed 
among  people  of  little  culture,  whose  lives 
were  hard  and  bare.  The  boy  got  little 
education,  and  never  was  a  scholar.  To 
the  day  of  his  death,  he  wrote  the  English 
language  with  difficulty,  making  many  errors 
of  grammar  and  spelling,  and  spoke  it  with 
many  peculiarities  of  pronunciation.  Of 
other  languages  he  knew  nothing ;  of  the 
great  body  of  science,  literature,  and  the 
arts  he  knew  next  to  nothing.  In  fact,  he 
probably  got  less  from  books  than  any  other 
famous  man  in  American  history. 

Little  is  authentically  known  of  his  early 
years.  It  is  clear,  however,  that  he  was  a 
mischievous,  high-spirited  boy,  and  often 
got  into  trouble.  At  least  one  anecdote  is 
thoroughly  in  keeping  with  his  career  in 


THE  WAXHAWS:  THE  WILDERNESS    7 

manhood.  Some  of  his  playmates,  so  the 
story  goes,  once  loaded  a  gun  to  the  muzzle 
and  gave  it  him  to  fire.  As  they  expected, 
it  kicked  him  over,  but  they  missed  the  fun 
they  looked  for.  He  sprang  to  his  feet 
white  with  rage,  and  exclaimed,  with  an 
path,  "  If  one  of  you  laughs,  I  '11  kill  him !  " 
—  and  no  one  laughed.  The  oath  itself  is 
not  an  unimportant  part  of  the  story,  for  it 
may  as  well  be  said  at  once  that  Andrew 
Jackson,  until  near  the  end  of  his  life,  had 
many  such  vices  as  swearing.  He  not  only 
swore,  but  he  frequently  quarrelled  and 
fought ;  he  was  at  one  time  given  to  bet 
ting,  particularly  on  horses ;  he  drank,  and 
he  used  tobacco  constantly.  All  of  these 
habits  were  common  in  the  society  to  which 
he  was  born,  and  he  did  not  escape  them. 
But  some  things  he  did  escape.  He  hated 
debt  all  his  life,  and  was  willing  to  do  al 
most  anything  rather  than  incur  it.  He 
had  the  greatest  reverence  for  women,  and 
bore  himself  towards  them  with  a  courtesy 
and  tenderness,  a  knightly  purity  of  thought 
and  word  and  deed,  which  the  finest  gentle- 


8  ANDREW  JACKSON 

man  of  the  most  ancient  society  in  the  world 
could  not  have  surpassed. 

When  this  pleasing  fact  is  stated,  one's 
thoughts  turn  naturally  to  his  widowed 
mother,  as  to  the  most  natural  source  of 
such  an  excellence  in  the  son.  All  we  know 
of  her  does  indeed  indicate  that  her  in 
fluence  on  him  was  both  strong  and  good : 
but  we  know  very  little.  She  was  a  simple, 
uncultivated  person,  like  most  of  her  neigh 
bors,  but  her  conduct  during  the  harrowing 
scenes  of  the  revolutionary  war  makes  us 
think  she  was  in  some  respects  extraordi 
nary.  The  struggle  was  nowhere  rougher 
and  fiercer  than  it  was  in  the  Carolinas.  The 
notorious  Colonel  Tarleton  operated  in  the 
Waxhaws  neighborhood,  and  many  dreadful 
stories  of  suffering  and  cruelty  belong  to  that 
country  and  that  time.  The  Jackson  family 
had  their  full  share  of  the  fighting  and  the 
suffering.  The  two  older  boys,  Hugh  and 
Robert,  enlisted.  Young  "  Andy  "  himself, 
when  he  was  barely  in  his  teens,  carried  a 
musket.  He  and  Robert  were  captured,  and 
were  released  through  the  efforts  of  their 


THE  WAXHAWS:  THE  WILDERNESS    9 

mother,  who  brought  about  an  exchange  of 
prisoners.  Soon  afterwards,  she  went  on  a 
long  and  heroic  journey  to  Charleston  to 
nurse  the  sick  Americans  confined  on  the 
British  prison  ships  there ;  and  there  she  fell 
ill  of  the  ship  fever  and  died.  Hugh  and 
Robert  both  died  in  the  service. 

Andrew  was  thus  left  an  orphan,  weakened 
in  body  by  the  smallpox,  which  he  took  while 
he  was  in  prison.  Moreover,  he  bore  on  his 
head  the  mark  of  a  blow  from  the  sword  of 
a  British  officer  whose  boots  he  had  refused 
•  to  polish.  No  man  ever  lived  who  had  a 
simpler  human  way  of  loving  those  who  be 
friended  him  and  of  hating  those  who  hurt 
him  than  Andrew  Jackson ;  and  surely  few 
men  ever  had  better  excuse  than  he  for  hat 
ing  the  British  uniform.  His  feeling  against 
the  British  was  one  of  the  things  that  colored 
his  opinions  on  public  questions;  the  su 
preme  hour  of  his  life  was  the  hour  when, 
at  New  Orleans,  he  had  his  revenge  —  full 
measure,  heaped  up,  and  running  over  — 
for  all  that  he  had  suffered  in  the  Wax- 
haws.  Scholarly  historians,  passing  rapidly 


10  ANDREW  JACKSON 

over  the  events  of  his  childhood,  give  many 
pages  of  learned  criticism  to  the  course  he 
took  on  great  public  questions  in  later  years, 
and  gravely  deplore  the  terrible  passions 
that  swayed  him  when,  no  doubt,  he  should 
have  been  as  deliberate  and  calm  as  they 
are  while  they  review  his  stormy  life.  But 
for  those  who  would  rather  understand  than 
judge  him  it  surely  cannot  seem  a  small 
thing  that  he  started  out  in  life  with  such  a 
heritage  of  bitter  memories,  such  a  schooling 
in  hatred,  as  few  children  were  ever  cursed 
with.  Passion  and  revenge  are  wrong,  of 
course,  but  the  sandy-haired,  pockmarked 
lad  of  the  Waxhaws  had  better  excuse  than 
most  boys  for  failing  to  learn  that  lesson. 
It  is  doubtful,  indeed,  if  any  one  ever  took 
the  trouble  to  teach  it  him.  '  One  little 
thing  that  stuck  in  his  mind  probably  hurt 
worse  than  the  sabre  cut  on  his  head.  He 
did  not  even  know  where  his  mother's  grave 
was. 

It  does  not  appear  that  during  the  next 
seven  years,  while  he  was  growing  to  man 
hood,  he  gave  himself  with  much  industry 


THE  WAXHAWS:  THE  WILDERNESS    11 

either  to  study  or  to  work.  For  six  months 
he  was  employed  in  the  shop  of  a  saddler, 
but  he  seems  to  have  learned  more  about 
filling  saddles  than  about  making  them,  for 
he  became  somewhat  famous  as  a  horseman 
even  in  a  country  where  the  love  of  horse 
flesh  was  universal.  He  got  acquainted 
with  some  wealthy  people  from  Charleston 
who  were  exiled  until  the  British  evacuated 
their  city,  and  lived  with  them  a  sporting 
life  which  was  beyond  his  means.  After  the 
peace  he  made  a  visit  to  Charleston,  got  into 
debt,  got  out  of  it  by  winning  a  wager,  and 
grew  somewhat  graver  in  consequence  of  his 
experience.  There  is  even  some  reason  to 
believe  that  he  went  to  work  as  a  school-  u* 
master ;  and  doubtless  some  backwoods  * 
schools  of  that  period  had  masters  as  igno 
rant  as  Andrew  Jackson.  Finally^ne  re 
solved  to  study  law,  and  in  the  whiter  of 
1784-5  started  out  to  find  an  office  in  which 
he  might  prepare  himself  for  his  profession. 
He  found  a  place  in  the  office  of  Mr.  Spruce 
McCay,  of  Salisbury,  North  Carolina,  an  \ 
old-fashioned  Southern  town,  where  he  made 


12-  ANDREW  JACKSON 

Ms  home  until  1788,  when  he  was  admitted 
to  the  bar. 

All  that  is  known  of  his  life  at  Salisbury 
accords  with  what  is  known  of  his  life 
at  the  Waxhaws.  He  was  ready  for  a  frolic 
or  a  fight  at  any  hour  of  the  day  or  night ; 
he  excelled  in  such  sports  as  required 
swiftness  and  nerve ;  he  was  fond  of  practi 
cal  jokes;  he  was  not  over  fond  of  study, 
and  never  acquired  any  great  knowledge 
of  the  law.  At  twenty,  when  his  studies 
were  finished,  he  is  described  as  a  tall, 
slender  young  fellow,  with  a  thin,  fair  face 
and  deep  blue  eyes,  by  no  means  handsome, 
but  distinguished  by  considerable  grace  and 
dignity  of  manner  ;  an  exquisite  rider  and 
a  capital  shot ;  of  an  extraordinarily  pas 
sionate  temper,  yet  singularly  swift,  even 
when  his  anger  was  at  white  heat,  to  seize 
upon  the  right  means  to  protect  himself  or 
discomfit  an  adversary ;  already  somewhat 
of  a  leader,  not  by  any  eminence  of  talent 
or  knowledge,  but  because  he  had  a  gift  of 
leadership  and  was  always  intensely  minded 
to  have  his  way.  The  year  of  his  admission 


THE  WAXHAWS:  THE  WILDERNESS    13 

to  the  bar,  after  a  brief  stay  at  Martinsville, 
a  small  North  Carolina  town,  he  got  himself 
appointed  solicitor,  or  public  prosecutor,  of 
the  western  district  of  Tennessee,  and  soon 
set  out  for  the  West. 

The  appointment  of  so  young  a  man  to 
such  an  office  seems  remarkable  until  one 
knows  what  Tennessee  was  like  at  that  time, 
and  what  duties  a  solicitor  was  expected  to 
discharge.  The  term  Tennessee  is,  in  fact, 
misleading.  The  region  to  which  Jackson 
went  still  belonged  to  North  Carolina,  though 
its  inhabitants  had  but  a  little  while  before 
made  an  attempt  to  set  up  a  separate  State 
under  the  name  of  Franklin.  But  of  those 
who  made  the  attempt  the  great  majority 
had  lived  in  that  part  of  North  Carolina's 
western  lands  which  is  now  East  Tennessee 
—  a  mountainous  region  of  which  Jones- 
boro,  a  squatter  town  of  fifty  or  sixty 
log-houses,  was  the  metropolis.  Nashville, 
whither  Jackson  was  bound,  was  nearly  two 
hundred  miles  west  of  Jonesboro,  and  the 
Nashville  settlement  was  as  yet  less  than 
ten  years  old.  It  was  founded  in  1779  by 


14  ANDREW  JACKSON 

Captain  James  Robertson  with  a  little  com 
pany  of  nine.  The  next  year  Colonel  John 
Donelson,  with  a  much  larger  party,  in 
cluding  women  and  children,  came  from 
Virginia  to  join  his  friend  Robertson.  His 
journey  was  one  of  the  most  striking  inci 
dents  in  the  peopling  of  the  West,  for  it  was 
made  in  flatboats  which  passed  down  the 
Holston  into  the  Tennessee,  down  the  Ten 
nessee  into  the  Ohio,  up  the  Ohio  into  the 
Cumberland,  and  up  the  Cumberland  to 
Nashville.  It  took  four  months  to  cover 
the  two  thousand  miles  or  more,  and  there 
were  bloody  fights  with  Indians,  sickness, 
and  death  by  the  way.  When,  eight  years  . 
later,  after  an  overland  journey  through  a 
wilderness  still  almost  unbroken  and  still  in 
fested  with  Indians,  Jackson  came  to  Nash 
ville,  he  found  Mrs.  Donelson  a  widow,  for 
her  husband  had  been  murdered ;  and  he 
soon  became  an  inmate  of  her  home. 

It  was  well  for  a  widow  in  that  wild  coun 
try  if  she  could  procure  men  "boarders," 
even  though  she  might  not  need  to  "  take 
boarders  "  for  a  living ;  for  every  house- 


THE  WAXHAWS:  THE  WILDERNESS    15 

hold  needed  men  to  protect  it  from  the  In 
dians.  Immigration  was  increasing  con 
stantly,  but  the  white  population  was  still 
far  too  small  to  be  safe.  Within  seven 
miles  of  Nashville,  during  the  years  1780- 
1794,  the  Indians  killed,  on  an  average,  one 
white  person  every  ten  days. 

Life  in  such  a  country  was  even  rougher 
and  barer  than  in  the  Waxhaws.  The 
houses  were  chiefly  cabins  made  of  unhewn 
logs,  and  the  things  which  in  older  commu 
nities  make  the  inside  of  houses  attractive 
were  almost  wholly  wanting.  Such  mer 
chandise  as  was  offered  to  the  settlers  had 
to  be  fetched  hundreds  of  miles,  —  usually 
from  Philadelphia,  —  and  grew  very  dear  by 
the  time  it  reached  them.  For  food,  cloth 
ing,  and  shelter  each  family  relied  mainly 
on  the  handiwork  of  its  own  members.  As 
in  all  frontier  regions,  the  population  was 
chiefly  male.  The  brave  women  who  took 
their  share  of  the  common  work  and  hard 
ship  were  treated  with  much  respect,  and 
did  their  part  well,  no  doubt,  but  they  had 
little  leisure  for  those  arts  which  brighten 


16  ANDREW  JACKSON 

the  lives  and  refine  the  characters  of  hus 
bands  and  children. 

Manners  suited  conditions.  These  build 
ers  of  the  West  had  more  strength  than  gen 
tleness,  more  shrewdness  than  wisdom,  more 
courage  than  culture.  They  were  the  rough 
front  which  American  civilization  presented 
to  the  wilderness  and  the  savage,  —  brave, 
hard-handed,  themselves  somewhat  affected 
with  the  barbarism  they  came  to  displace, 
yet  in  all  essentials  of  character  true  repre 
sentatives  of  their  masterful  race.  They  were 
mainly  of  English  or  Scotch-Irish  stock ;  and 
no  other  breeds  of  white  men  have  ever 
shown  such  capacity  as  these  two  for  dealing 
with  inferior  races  and  new  countries.  Their 
virtues  were  courage,  energy,  alertness,  in 
ventiveness,  generosity,  honesty,  truth-speak 
ing  ;  their  commonest  faults  were  violence, 
combativeness,  lax  ways  in  business,  intem 
perance,  narrowness  of  mind.  They  hated 
foreigners  and  Indians,  and  were  ready  to 
fight  any  one  who  behaved  like  an  enemy  or 
a  critic  ;  they  held  in  honor  women,  their 
country,  and  brave  men.  Shut  off  from 


THE  WAXHAWS:  THE  WILDERNESS    17 

the  greater  world  to  the  eastward,  and  hav 
ing  few  pleasures  such  as  most  Americans 
may  now  enjoy,  they  filled  their  leisure  hours 
with  such  sports  as  hunting,  horse-racing, 
drinking  bouts,  fights,  and  lawsuits.  The 
law,  indeed,  they  held  in  great  reverence ; 
that  race  mark  they  had  in  common  with 
all  other  societies  made  up  of  Englishmen 
and  Americans  of  English  descent.  But 
they  were  even  fonder  of  fighting  than  of 
the  law,  and  the  particular  laws  which  were 
at  once  hardest  to  enforce  and  most  in  need 
of  enforcement  were  those  very  simple  laws 
which  set  forth  the  principle  that  private 
wrongs  must  be  righted  in  the  courts,  which 
stand  for  the  peace  of  the  State,  and  not  by 
the  "  wild  justice  "  of  revenge. 

The  difficult  and  dangerous  work  of  keep 
ing  order  and  of  enforcing  business  obliga 
tions  fell  largely  to  the  "  solicitor ; "  and 
one  need  not  wonder  that  there  was  no  great 
scramble  for  the  office,  so  that  a  very  young 
man,  with  no  experience  at  the  bar  and 
little  knowledge  of  law,  got  the  appointment. 
His  duties  were  simple  enough,  but  he  had 


18  ANDREW  JACKSON 

no  reason  to  complain  of  being  left  in  idle 
ness.  The  court  records  of  the  period  show 
a  picturesque  assortment  of  assaults,  street- 
fights,  pistollings,  gougings,  and  the  like. 
Men  who  took  such  methods  to  adjust  their 
differences  were  not  apt  to  show  any  great 
respect  to  a  prosecutor  aged  twenty-one. 
The  majesty  of  the  law  had  need  of  a  vig 
orous  rather  than  a  learned  representative ; 
and  the  representative  had  need  of  other 
weapons  than  those  supplied  by  the  law 
books  if  he  meant  to  make  his  authority  re 
spected  and  yet  keep  a  whole  skin  on  his 
body.  If  he  proved  weak  and  timid,  he 
was  sure  to  be  despised ;  if  determined  and 
relentless,  he  was  sure  to  make  enemies ;  if 
incautious  and  unwary,  he  would  probably 
get  himself  shot.  It  is  doubtful,  however, 
if  any  better  man  than  young  Jackson  could 
have  been  found  for  the  place,  and  that  is 
almost  the  same  thing  as  saying  that  no 
better  place  could  have  been  found  for  him. 
To  the  office  and  his  new  surroundings  he 
brought  the  qualities  they  supremely  de 
manded,  —  a  will  that  no  man  ever  subdued, 


THE  WAXHAWS:  THE  WILDERNESS    19 

a  desperate  courage  which  not  even  the  Ten- 
nesseans  could  match,  and  a  swift,  intuitive 
perception  of  the  way  to  act  in  emergencies. 
According  to  all  accounts,  he  was  success 
ful  from  the  first  in  his  trying  work,  and 
his  success  in  that  brought  him  other  work 
as  a  lawyer  and  a  rapid  rise  to  prominence 
in  the  community.  He  became  well  ac 
quainted,  for  his  work  required  much  travel 
ling  about.  He  learned  the  country  itself. 
On  his  long  journeys  he  was  frequently  in 
danger  from  the  Indians,  and  learned  their 
ways  and  how  to  cope  with  them.  Some 
times  he  slept  alone  in  the  woods,  or  even 
lay  all  night  awake,  his  hand  on  his  rifle. 
Once  his  readiness  and  nerve  alone  saved 
himself  and  a  party  of  travellers  from  sur 
prise  and  massacre.  Whether  he  dealt  with 
Indians  who  beset  his  pathway  through  the 
wilderness,  or  white  men  who  would  not  let 
the  law  take  its  course,  it  is  not  on  record 
that  he  ever  turned  aside  from  his  purpose. 
In  ten  years  he  was  the  possessor  of  a  con 
siderable  estate,  chiefly  in  land.  And  he 
had  not  accumulated  property  by  neglecting 


20  ANDREW  JACKSON 

his  duties  as  solicitor.  When  certain  in 
truders  on  Indian  lands  were  giving  trouble, 
Governor  Blount  said :  "  Let  the  district 
attorney,  Mr.  Jackson,  be  informed.  He 
will  be  certain  to  do  his  duty,  and  the 
offenders  will  be  punished." 

But  the  district  attorney  did  not  escape 
the  consequences  of  his  firmness  and  cour 
age.  He  had  so  many  "  difficulties  "  that 
even  in  that  country  he  soon  got  a  reputa 
tion  for  readiness  to  fight.  Amass  of  anec 
dote  and  tradition  about  his  early  quarrels, 
has  come  down  to  us.  Some  of  these  affairs 
seem  to  have  been  undignified  and  rather 
ludicrous  scuffles :  in  one  of  them  Jackson 
overcame  a  huge  antagonist  by  poking  him 
with  the  point  —  or,  as  Jackson  himself  pro 
nounced  it,  the  "  pint  "  —  of  a  fence  rail. 
Other  quarrels  followed  the  dignified  pro 
cedure  of  the  duello.  They  were  all  subject 
to  the  condemnation  which  our  gentler  civil 
ization  pronounces  on  violence  as  a  means 
of  ending  disputes,  but  no  doubt  they  helped 
the  young  lawyer  into  the  prominence  he 
had  won  by  the  time  Tennessee  was  ready  to 
become  a  State. 


THE  WAXHAWS:  THE  WILDERNESS    21 

The  most  important  event  of  this  early 
period  of  Jackson's  life  was  his  marriage. 
It  was  first  solemnized  early  in  1791,  and  a 
second  time  in  January,  1794.  The  second 
ceremony  was  due  to  the  painful  discovery 
that  at  the  time  of  the  first  his  wife  was  not 
fully  released  from  a  former  marriage.  She 
was  Rachel,  daughter  of  John  Donelson, 
the  pioneer,  and  when  Jackson  first  came  to 
Tennessee  she  was  already  married  to  one 
Lewis  Robards.  Robards  was  a  jealous 
husband.  He  made  charges  against  his 
wife  concerning  several  men,  and  finallv 
concerning  Jackson,  although  the  facts  that 
have  come  down  to  us  and  the  opinions  of 
those  who  knew  most  about  the  affair  all  go 
to  show  that  Jackson  acted  as  a  chivalrous 
protector  of  a  distressed  woman,  and  never 
knowingly  committed  any  offence  against 
his  accuser's  home.  Robards  and  Rachel 
Donelson  had  been  married  in  Kentucky, 
then  a  part  of  Virginia,  and  Virginia  had  no 
law  of  divorce.  In  1790  the  Virginia  leg 
islature,  acting  on  a  petition  of  Robards, 
authorized  the  supreme  court  of  Kentucky 


22  ANDREW  JACKSON 

to  try  the  case  and  grant  him  a  divorce  if  it 
should  find  his  charges  against  his  wife  and 
Jackson  to  be  true.  Somehow,  Jackson  and 
Mrs.  Robards  were  persuaded  that  this  act  of 
the  Virginia  legislature  was  itself  a  divorce, 
and  so  they  were  married.  In  1793,  how 
ever,  Robards  brought  suit  before  the  Ken 
tucky  court,  and  the  court,  finding  on  the 
facts  as  they  then  existed,  when  the  accused 
couple  were  living  together  as  man  and  wife, 
granted  the  decree.  In  order,  therefore,  to 
make  sure  of  a  legal  marriage,  Jackson  had 

ceremony  repeated. 

It  was  a  most  unfortunate  situation  for  an 
honest  man  and  an  honest  woman,  and  sad 
dened  a  union  which  was  otherwise  pure  and 
beautiful ;  for  to  the  day  of  her  death  Jack 
son  and  his  wife  loved  each  other  most  ten 
derly.  It  brought  into  his  life  a  new  ele 
ment  of  bitterness  and  passion.  Whoever, 
by  the  slightest  hint,  referred  to  the  irregu 
larity  of  his  marriage,  became  his  mortal 
enemy.  For  such  he  kept  his  pistols  always 
ready,  and  more  than  one  incautious  man 
found  to  his  cost  what  it  meant  to  breathe 


THE  WAXHAWS:  THE  WILDERNESS    23 

a  word  on  that  forbidden  subject.  One 
such  man  was  no  less  a  person  than  John 
Sevier,  "  the  Commonwealth  Builder,"  who 
struck  such  a  good  blow  for  American  in 
dependence  at  the  battle  of  King's  Moun 
tain  in  the  revolutionary  war,  and  who  was 
Governor  of  Tennessee  when  the  trouble 
with  Jackson  occurred. 

The  painful  facts  of  his  marriage,  and  the 
criticism  of  his  wife,  had  another  effect  on 
Jackson  which  in  time  became  important  to 
the  whole  country.  Through  that  experience 
his  chivalrous  feeling  for  women  was  devel 
oped  into  a  quixotic  readiness  to  be  the  cham 
pion  of  any  woman  whom  }ie  found  distressed 
or  slandered/'  ?* 


II 

CONGKESS:    THE    BENCH:    THE   MILITIA 

IN  1796  Jackson  took  his  seat  as  a  mem 
ber  of  the  convention  called  to  frame  a  con 
stitution  for  the  State  of  Tennessee.  He 
thus  entered  on  a  brief  career  of  public  ser 
vice,  in  the  course  of  which  he  held  three 
important  offices.  In  the  autumn  of  1796 
he  was  chosen  to  be  Tennessee's  first  repre 
sentative  in  Congress.  A  year  later  he  was 
appointed  United  States  Senator,  and  held 
the  office  -until  he  resigned  in  April,  1798. 
From  1798  until  1804,  he  was  a  justice  of 
the  Supreme  Court  of  Tennessee. 

These  were  all  high  places  for  so  young 
a  man,  and  one  naturally  expects  his  bio 
grapher  to  linger  for  many  pages  over  his 
course  while  he  held  them.  The  fact  that 
he  held  them  is  indeed  important,  for  it 
shows  how  strongly  he  had  established  him 
self  in  Tennessee.  But  very  little  need  be 


CONGRESS:  BENCH:  MILITIA         25 

said  of  what  he  did  while  he  held  them. 
Indeed,  it  is  amazing  how  little  can  be  said. 

In  the  convention  he  served  on  the  eom- 
mittee  to  draft  the  constitution  and  took  a 
somewhat  prominent  part  in  the  debates, 
and  there  is  also  a  tradition  that  he  sug 
gested  the  name  of  the  State ;  but  no  nota 
ble  feature  of  the  constitution  is  clearly  due 
to  him.  It  might,  however,  have  been  due 
to  the  presence  in  the  convention  of  such 
fiery  spirits  as  he  that  it  adopted  a  rule  of 
order  which  throws  into  comical  prominence 
the  warlike  character  of  early  Tennesseans. 
Rule  8  declared  :  "  He  that  digresseth  from 
the  subject  to  fall  on  the  person  of  any  mem 
ber  shall  be  suppressed  by  the  Speaker." 

The  scant  record  of  Jackson's  services 
in  the  House  of  Representatives  and  in  the 
Senate  is  of  little  importance  to  us  save  in 
three  respects.  It  throws  some  light  on  his 
political  opinions  at  that  period ;  it  gives  us 
a  glimpse  of  him  as  he  appeared  against  the 
background  of  the  most  elegant  society  then 
existing  in  America,  for  Congress  was  sit 
ting  in  Philadelphia,  which  had  sixty-five 


26  ANDREW  JACKSON 

thousand  inhabitants  ?  and  it  led  to  one  or 
two  friendships  which  had  an  important 
bearing  on  his  later  career. 

His  opinions,  however,  were  not  expressed 
in  speeches.  He  addressed  the  House  but 
twice,  both  times  on  a  resolution  for  paying 
troops  whom  General  Sevier  had  led  against 
the  Indians  without  any  order  from  the 
national  government.  The  resolution  passed, 
and  added  to  Jackson's  popularity  at  home. 
In  the  Senate  it  is  not  on  record  that  he 
ever  spoke  at  all.  Many  years  afterwards, 
Thomas  Jefferson,  who  was  Vice-President 
in  1797-8,  gave  to  Daniel  Webster  a  rather 
curious  explanation  of  the  Tennessee  Sena 
tor's  silence.  The  accuracy  of  Webster's 
report  of  his  famous  interview  with  Jeffer 
son  at  Monticello  in  1824  has  been  ques 
tioned,  but  if  it  is  correct,  this  is  what  Jef 
ferson  said  of  Jackson :  u  His  passions  are 
terrible.  When  I  was  president  of  the 
Senate,  he  was  Senator,  and  he  could  never 
speak  on  account  of  the  rashness  of  his 
feelings.  I  have  seen  him  attempt  it  re 
peatedly,  and  as  often  choke  with  rage." 


CONGRESS:  BENCH:  MILITIA         27 

His  votes,  however,  and  a  few  letters 
show  clearly  enough  where  he  stood  on  the 
questions  of  the  day.  Parties  were  hardly 
yet  formed  under  the  Constitution,  but  in 
the  strife  between  the  followers  of  Hamil 
ton,  who  went  for  a  strong  national  govern 
ment,  and  who  became  the  Federalist  party, 
on  the  one  hand,  and,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  followers  of  Jefferson,  who  went  for  the 
rights  of  the  States  and  distrusted  a  strong 
national  government,  and  who  became  the 
Kepublican  party,  he  sided  with  Jefferson. 
Indeed,  he  belonged  to  the  extreme  faction 
of  the  Republicans,  to  which  the  term  "  Demo 
crats  "  was  applied,  at  first  as  a  reproach. 
He  favored  the  French,  who  were  at  war 
with  England,  and  opposed  the  treaty  with 
England  which  John  Jay  had  just  negotiated. 
He  even  went  so  far  as  to  vote,  with  eleven 
others,  against  the  address  presented  to 
President  Washington  after  his  final  speech 
to  Congress.  The  address  was  mainly  given 
over  to  thanks  for  Washington's  great  ser 
vices  to  his  country  and  to  praise  of  his 
administration.  The  handful  that  opposed 


28  ANDREW  JACKSON 

it  showed  at  least  courage.  One  of  them, 
Edward  Livingston,  of  New  York,  after 
wards  defended  himself  by  drawing  a  dis 
tinction  between  Washington  and  his  ad 
ministration.  At  that  time  the  partisans 
of  France  were  very  bitter  over  the  firm 
course  Washington  took  to  keep  the  coun 
try  out  of  the  European  contest,  and  over 
the  treaty  with  England. 

Livingston  was  one  of  the  men  with 
whom  Jackson  at  this  time  formed  a  last 
ing  friendship.  He  was  an  accomplished 
gentleman,  a  very  able  lawyer,  and  an  ad 
vanced  Kepublican.  Another  was  William 
Duane,  Jefferson's  friend,  the  editor  of  "  The 
Aurora,"  a  newspaper  which  helped  to  build 
up  the  Republican  party.  A  third  was 
Aaron  Burr,  who  then  stood  very  high 
among  the  Republican  leaders,  and  who 
excelled  all  other  public  men  in  charm  of 
manner. 

Another  leading  Republican  of  the  time, 
Albert  Gallatin,  recalled  Jackson  after 
wards  as  "  a  tall,  lank,  uncouth-looking  per 
sonage,  with  long  locks  of  hair  hanging  over 


CONGRESS:   BENCH:  MILITIA         29 

his  face,  and  a  cue  down  his  back  tied  in  an 
eel-skin  ;  his  dress  singular,  his  manners 
and  deportment  that  of  a  rough  backwoods 
man."  Taking  this  with  Jefferson's  descrip 
tion  of  him,  it  seems  clear  that  he  made  no 
strong  impression  at  Philadelphia,  and  found 
himself  out  of  place  in  the  national  legisla 
ture.  Who,  then,  would  have  dreamed  that 
the  accomplished  Livingston  should  win  his 
highest  fame  by  preparing  a  state  paper  for 
this  unlettered  person's  signature ;  that  this 
rough  backwoodsman  should  alone  of  all 
Americans  surpass  the  polished  Burr  in  the 
charm  of  his  manners  ;  that  Duane's  little 
son  should  one  day  be  called  by  his  father's 
unpromising  acquaintance  to  a  place  such  as 
even  Jefferson's  friendship  never  conferred 
upon  Duane  himself.  Of  all  who  knew 
Jackson  in  Washington,  Burr  seems  to  have 
had  the  strongest  hopes  for  his  future. 

Scant  as  are  the  traces  of  his  labors  as  a 
legislator,  even  scanter  are  the  records  of 
his  career  on  the  bench  during  the  six  years 
that  followed.  The  reports  of  the  decisions  of 
the  Tennessee  Supreme  Court  in  this  period 


SO  ANDREW  JACKSON 

are  extremely  meagre  ;  not  one  decision  is 
preserved  as  Jackson's.  But  the  stories 
told  of  Judge  Jackson,  like  the  stories  told 
of  the  solicitor,  the  general,  the  president, 
are  legion.  One  must  suffice.  A  gigantic 
blacksmith  named  Bean  had  committed  a 
crime  and  the  sheriff  dared  not  arrest  him. 
"  Summon  me,"  said  the  judge,  and  himself 
walked  down  from  the  bench,  found  the 
criminal,  and  arrested  him.  It  was  while 
he  was  judge  that  his  quarrel  with  John 
Sevier,  who  was  again  governor  in  1803, 
came  finally  to  a  head.  Two  years  before, 
the  two  men  had  been  rivals  for  the  office 
of  major-general  in  the  militia,  and  by  a 
single  vote  Jackson  had  won,  so  that  he  was 
both  general  and  judge  when  he  and  the 
governor  met  in  what  seemed  likely  to 
prove  a  fatal  combat.  However,  neither 
was  killed,  and  the  quarrel  was  patched  up. 
In  1804  Judge  Jackson  resigned.  He  had 
not  yet  found  his  true  place  in  the  public 
service.  But  he  kept  his  commission  in  the 
militia,  and  those  who  like  to  magnify  the 
work  of  chance  may  argue  that  the  single 


CONGRESS:  BENCH:  MILITIA         31 

vote  by  which  he  got  that  office  determined 
his  career. 

But  he  had  years  to  live  before  it  was 
made  plain  to  him  what  his  career  should 
be  ;  and  during  those  years,  from  1804  to 
1813,  his  energies  were  given  chiefly  to 
planting  and  business.  His  affairs  had  be 
come  somewhat  involved  while  he  was  a 
judge,  and  to  restore  his  fortunes  he  entered 
into  trade  and  set  up  a  store.  In  this  and 
other  enterprises  a  stalwart  Tennessean 
named  John  Coffee  was  his  partner,  and  be 
tween  the  two  there  grew  a  bond  of  friend 
ship  which  lasted  until  death  broke  it. 
Jackson  had  considerable  shrewdness  in 
trade,  and  his  reputation  for  paying  his 
debts  promptly  was  of  great  value,  but  he 
had  more  success  in  planting  and  stock-rais 
ing  than  in  any  other  money-making  enter 
prise.  His  judgment  of  horses  was  excep 
tionally  good.  From  his  famous  stallion, 
Truxton,  a  great  racer  in  his  day,  many 
Tennessee  thoroughbreds  of  the  present  time 
are  descended.  Horse-racing  was  Jackson's 
favorite  sport,  and  was  a  source  of  profit 


30  ANDREW  JACKSON 

are  extremely  meagre  ;  not  one  decision  is 
preserved  as  Jackson's.  But  the  stories 
told  of  Judge  Jackson,  like  the  stories  told 
of  the  solicitor,  the  general,  the  president, 
are  legion.  One  must  suffice.  A  gigantic 
blacksmith  named  Bean  had  committed  a 
crime  and  the  sheriff  dared  not  arrest  him. 
"  Summon  me,"  said  the  judge,  and  himself 
walked  down  from  the  bench,  found  the 
criminal,  and  arrested  him.  It  was  while 
he  was  judge  that  his  quarrel  with  John 
Sevier,  who  was  again  governor  in  1803, 
came  finally  to  a  head.  Two  years  before, 
the  two  men  had  been  rivals  for  the  office 
of  major-general  in  the  militia,  and  by  a 
single  vote  Jackson  had  won,  so  that  he  was 
both  general  and  judge  when  he  and  the 
governor  met  in  what  seemed  likely  to 
prove  a  fatal  combat.  However,  neither 
was  killed,  and  the  quarrel  was  patched  up. 
In  1804  Judge  Jackson  resigned.  He  had 
not  yet  found  his  true  place  in  the  public 
service.  But  he  kept  his  commission  in  the 
militia,  and  those  who  like  to  magnify  the 
work  of  chance  may  argue  that  the  single 


CONGRESS:  BENCH:  MILITIA         31 

vote  by  which  he  got  that  office  determined 
his  career. 

But  he  had  years  to  live  before  it  was 
made  plain  to  him  what  his  career  should 
be  ;  and  during  those  years,  from  1804  to 
1813,  his  energies  were  given  chiefly  to 
planting  and  business.  His  affairs  had  be 
come  somewhat  involved  while  he  was  a 
judge,  and  to  restore  his  fortunes  he  entered 
into  trade  and  set  up  a  store.  In  this  and 
other  enterprises  a  stalwart  Tennessean 
named  John  Coffee  was  his  partner,  and  be 
tween  the  two  there  grew  a  bond  of  friend 
ship  which  lasted  until  death  broke  it. 
Jackson  had  considerable  shrewdness  in 
trade,  and  his  reputation  for  paying  his 
debts  promptly  was  of  great  value,  but  he 
had  more  success  in  planting  and  stock-rais 
ing  than  in  any  other  money-making  enter 
prise.  His  judgment  of  horses  was  excep 
tionally  good.  From  his  famous  stallion, 
Truxton,  a  great  racer  in  his  day,  many 
Tennessee  thoroughbreds  of  the  present  time 
are  descended.  Horse-racing  was  Jackson's 
favorite  sport,  and  was  a  source  of  profit 


32  ANDREW  JACKSON 

also.  In  1805  he  first  occupied  the  estate 
which  became  so  well  known  as  "  The  Her 
mitage,"  where  he  built  a  block-house  of 
three  rooms  ;  the  mansion  so  often  displayed 
in  pictures  was  not  built  until  1819.  In 
the  log-house,  however,  no  less  than  in  the 
mansion  which  was  to  follow,  he  offered  to 
guests  of  high  and  low  degree  a  hospitality 
which  would  have  been  extraordinary  out 
side  of  the  Southern  States.  Probably  his 
planter  life  had  some  effect  on  his  manners, 
and  helped  him  to  acquire  that  mingling  of 
cordiality  and  distinction  which  in  those 
days  gave  a  peculiar  charm  to  the  gentle 
men  of  the  South. 

Even  in  his  quarrels,  violent,  passionate, 
and  wilful  as  he  was,  he  usually  bore  him 
self  in  a  way  to  make  a  deep  impression  on 
the  impressionable  people  among  whom  he 
lived.  Unfortunately,  his  quarrels  did  not 
grow  fewer  as  he  grew  older,  for  he  never 
learned  the  difference  between  mere  opposi 
tion  to  his  will,  which  might  be  conscien 
tious  and  honest,  and  personal  enmity  to 
himself.  Like  most  men  of  that  region  and 


CONGRESS:  BENCH:  MILITIA         33 

time,  he  carried  his  personal  feelings,  his. 
likes  and  dislikes,  into  all  the  affairs  of  life. 
In  1803-4,  when  he  wished  to  be  governor 
of  Orleans  Territory,  the  Tennessee  con 
gressmen  urged  President  Jefferson  to  ap 
point  him,  but  he  was  represented  to  the 
President  as  "a  man  of  violent  passions, 
arbitrary  in  his  disposition,  and  frequently 
engaged  in  broils  and  disputes." 

The  most  celebrated  and  perhaps  the 
worst  of  all  his  quarrels  was  that  with 
Charles  Dickinson,  a  young  man  of  promi 
nence,  a  duellist,  and  a  marvellous  shot.  It 
was  a  long  quarrel,  beginning,  apparently, 
over  a  projected  race  between  Truxton  and 
Plow  Bay,  a  horse  in  which  Dickinson  was 
interested.  Other  persons  were  involved 
before  the  quarrel  ended.  General  Jackson 
publicly  caned  one  Thomas  Swann  who  had 
contrived  to  get  himself  mixed  up  in  the 
affair.  Coffee,  acting  as  Jackson's  friend, 
had  a  duel  with  one  McNairy,  and  was 
severely  wounded.  Finally,  for  no  sufficient 
cause  which  the  printed  accounts  discover, 
Jackson  and  Dickinson  met  in  Kentucky, 


34  ANDREW  JACKSON 

each  bent  on  killing  his  man.  The  word 
being  given,  Dickinson  fired  quickly,  and 
with  perfect  aim ;  a  puff  of  dust  flew  up  from 
the  breast  of  Jackson's  coat.  But  he  kept 
his  feet,  drew  his  left  arm  across  his  breast, 
slowly  raised  his  pistol,  and  pulled  the  trig 
ger.  The  hammer  stopped  at  the  half- 
cock.  He  cocked  it  again,  aimed  deliber 
ately,  fired,  and  killed  his  man.  His  own 
life  he  owed  to  the  thinness  of  his  body,  for 
Dickinson  had  hit  the  spot  where  he  thought 
his  adversary's  heart  was  beating.  Jackson 
had  purposely  allowed  the  other  to  fire  first, 
expecting  to  be  hit,  and  fearing  that  if  he, 
too,  fired  hurriedly,  the  shock  would  spoil 
his  aim.  "  I  should  have  hit  him,"  he  said 
afterwards,  "had  he  shot  me  through  the 
brain."  It  is  supposed  that  his  hatred  of 
Dickinson  was  really  due,  not  to  the  con 
fused  dispute  over  the  race,  but  to  something 
Dickinson  had  said  in  his  cups  about  Mrs. 
Jackson.  Whatever  the  provocation,  the 
bloody  story  is  revolting  enough;  but  the 
picture  of  Jackson's  grim,  erect  figure,  his 
hawklike  eyes  terrible  with  hatred,  the  ball 


CONGRESS:  BENCH:  MILITIA         35 

in  his  breast,  the  pistol  in  his  hand,  must 
take  its  place  alongside  those  other  pictures 
and  statues  of  him  which  all  Americans 
know,  x 

But  if  Jackson  was  a  terrible  enemy,  he 
was  also  the  most  faithful  of  friends.  Many 
men  feared  and  hated  him ;  many  also 
loved  him,  and  he  himself  would  go  as  far 
to  help  a  friend  as  to  crush  an  enemy.  One 
of  his  friends  was  a  certain  Patten  Ander 
son,  who  seems  always  to  have  been  getting 
into  trouble,  but  whom  the  general  never 
deserted.  Once  Anderson  got  into  a  fight 
at  one  end  of  a  long  table  where  a  public 
dinner  was  being  served,  and  was  in  great 
danger  until  Jackson,  who  sat  at  the  other 
end,  noticed  the  scuffle.  "  I  'm  coining, 
Patten,"  he  cried,  and  promptly  leaped  on 
the  table  and  strode  through  dinner  to  the 
rescue.  Anderson  was  killed  at  last,  and 
Jackson  was  a  witness  at  the  trial  of  his 
slayer.  He  was  asked  if  the  unfortunate 
Anderson  was  not  given  in  his  lifetime  to 
quarrelling.  "  Sir,"  said  Jackson,  "  my 
friend,  Patten  Anderson,  was  a  natural 
enemy  to  scoundrels." 


36  ANDREW  JACKSON 

His  friendship  for  Aaron  Burr  came 
very  near  involving  him  in  serious  difficul 
ties.  In  1805,  when  Burr  was  on  his  first 
visit  to  the  Southwest,  he  went  to  Nashville, 
and  was  entertained  most  cordially  at  The 
Hermitage.  He  was  there  again  on  his 
return,  and  made  with  his  host  a  contract 
for  boats  and  supplies  to  be  used  in  that 
mysterious  enterprise  which  has  so  puzzled 
American  historians.  Burr  declared  he  had 
no  i  designs  hostile  to  the  United  States, 
and  Jackson  believed  him.  When,  a  year 
later,  the  whole  country  was  in  a  sort  of 
panic  over  Burr's  suspected  treason,  Jack 
son  offered  to  President  Jefferson  the  ser 
vices  of  the  militia  under  his  command,  and 
promptly  took  measures  to  thwart  any  trea 
sonable  movement  that  might  be  afoot  in  the 
West ;  but  he  was  soon  convinced  that  Burr 
was  suspected  unjustly,  and  never  for  a  mo 
ment  deserted  him  in  his  trouble.  He  went 
to  Richmond  to  testify  at  his  trial,  and 
while  there  made  a  public  speech  full  of 
bitterness  against  those  who,  as  he  thought, 
were  persecuting  his  friend.  He  himself 


CONGRESS:  BENCH:  MILITIA         37 

was  at  first  strongly  suspected  of  complicity 
in  Burr's  project,  but  there  is  absolutely  no 
reason  to  believe  that  Andrew  Jackson  ever 
in  his  life  looked  upon  an  enemy  of  his 
country  otherwise  than  as  his  own  mortal 
foe.  His  faults  were  many,  but  he  loved  his 
country  simply,  and  with  all  his  heart. 

It  seems  clear,  however,  that  Jackson, 
and  in  fact  the  whole  Southwest,  sympathized 
very  strongly  with  the  design  which  many 
in  that  quarter  at  first  thought  Burr  to^en- 
tertain  ;  the  design,  namely,  of  seizing  West 
Florida  or  Texas,  or  perhaps  both.  The 
United  States  were  at  that  time,  as  they 
were  before  and  after,  very  close  to  war  with 
Spain.  Spain  still  had  possession  of  the 
Floridas,  although  the  United  States  claimed 
that  West  Florida,  extending  along  the 
Gulf  coast  from  the  Perdido  River  to  the 
"  Island  of  New  Orleans,"  was  included  in 
the  Louisiana  purchase.  To  drive  the 
Spaniards  out  of  West  Florida  was  an 
ardent  desire  of  Jackson's.  Ten  years  be 
fore,  when  the  Eastern  States  had  shown 
little  interest  in  the  development  of  the 


38  ANDREW  JACKSON 

Southwest,  and  had  seemed  to  prefer  com 
mercial  privileges  with  the  Spanish  colonies 
to  the  free  navigation  of  the  Mississippi, 
which  the  Western  country  needed  for  its 
development,  Spanish  agents  had  endeav 
ored  to  stir  up  disaffection  in  the  South 
west,  looking  to  the  separation  of  that 
region  from  the  Union.  At  that  time,  many 
people  in  the  East,  knowing  little  of  the 
Westerners,  had  suspected  them  of  lending 
an  ear  to  Spain's  tempting  whispers.  That 
was  one  reason  why  such  a  panic  arose  over 
Burr,  for  he  had  always  been  a  champion  of 
the  Southwest,  and  the  pioneers  liked  him. 
After  the  failure  and  disgrace  of  Burr  the 
stage  was  cleared  for  another  leader  in  the 
southwestward  movement.  And  who  so 
likely  to  take  the  role  as  the  patriotic  and 
warlike  general  of  the  Tennessee  militia  ? 

Jackson  had  a  chance  to  play  that  role 
in  a  small  way  when  Silas  Dinsmore,  the 
United  States  agent  among  the  Choctaws, 
whose  lands  lay  in  Mississippi  Territory,  re 
fused  to  allow  persons  to  pass  through  the 
Choctaw  country  with  negroes  unless  they 


CONGRESS:  BENCH:  MILITIA         39 

showed  passports  for  the  negroes.  Dins- 
more  had  a  law  of  Congress  behind  him, 
but  a  treaty  between  the  United  States  and 
the  Choctaws  provided  for  a  road  through 
the  Choc  taw  country  which  should  be  "a 
highway  for  citizens  of  the  United  States 
and  the  Choctaws."  Jackson,  passing  along 
the  road  with  some  slaves,  dared  the  agent 
to  interfere.  He  also  exerted  himself  to 
bring  about  the  removal  of  Dinsmore,  and, 
as  his  wont  was,  made  a  personal  matter  of 
the  dispute.  His  feeling  was  so  strong  that 
years  afterwards,  when  Dinsmore,  happen 
ing  to  meet  him,  made  a  courteous  advance, 
the  general  sternly  repelled  it. 

The  quarrel  with  Dinsmore  occurred  in 
1812.  Andrew  Jackson  was  then  forty-five 
years  old.  He  was  well  known  in  Tennessee 
as  a  successful  planter,  a  breeder  and  racer 
of  horses,  a  swearer  of  mighty  oaths,  a  faith 
ful  and  generous  man  to  his  friends,  a  chiv 
alrous  man  to  women,  a  hospitable  man  at 
his  home,  a  desperate  and  relentless  man  in 
personal  conflicts,  a  man  who  always  did 
the  thing  he  set  himself  to  do.  But  as  yet 


40  ANDREW  JACKSON 

he  had  never  found  anything  to  do  that  was 
important  enough  to  bring  him  before  the 
country  at  large.  Outside  of  Tennessee, 
few  men  had  ever  heard  his  name.  At 
Washington  he  was  probably  distrusted,  so 
far  as  he  was  known  at  all,  because  of  his 
championship  of  Burr  and  his  quarrel  with 
Dinsmore,  and  because  he  had  been  for 
Monroe  instead  of  Madison  for  President. 
He  was  ardently  in  favor  of  war  with 
Great  Britain  because  of  the  impressment 
of  American  seamen  and  other  grievances 
which  the  United  States  had  borne  for 
years,  but  there  seemed  to  be  little  likeli 
hood  of  his  getting  a  chance  to  play  a  part 
in  the  war  if  it  should  come.  The  war  was 
declared  in  June,  1812.  A  member  of 
Congress,  on  his  way  home  after  voting  for 
the  declaration,  had  a  talk  with  Aaron  Burr, 
who  was  now  living  in  retirement  in  New 
York.  "  I  know,"  said  Burr,  "  that  my 
word  is  not  worth  much  with  Madison  ;  but 
you  may  tell  him  from  me  that  there  is  an 
unknown  man  in  the  West,  named  Andrew 
Jackson,  who  will  do  credit  to  a  commission 
in  the  army." 


CONGRESS:  BENCH:  MILITIA         41 

It  is  said,  indeed,  that  Jackson  was  twice 
recommended  to  President  Madison  for  a 
commission  in  the  regular  army,  and  twice 
rejected.  Many-  years  later,  Thomas  H. 
Benton  told  in  Congress  how  he  himself, 
who  was  in  1812  a  young  lawyer  in  Nash 
ville  and  a  militia  officer  under  Jackson, 
found  in  his  mail  one  morning  an  act  of 
Congress  authorizing  the  President  to  ac- 

O  O 

cept  organized  bodies  of  volunteers.  It  was 
a  raw  day  in  February,  but  young  Benton 
at  once  drew  up  a  plan  for  offering  Jack 
son's  militia  command  to  the  government, 
rode  to  The  Hermitage  to  find  the  general, 
"  and  came  upon  him,"  so  Mr.  Benton's 
story  goes,  "in  the  twilight,  sitting  alone 
before  the  fire,  a  lamb  and  a  child  between 
his  knees.  He  started  a  little,  called  a  ser 
vant  to  remove  the  two  innocents  to  another 
room,  and  explained  to  me  how  it  was.  The 
child  had  cried  because  the  lamb  was  out  in 
the  cold,  and  begged  him  to  bring  it  in  — 
which  he  had  done  to  please  the  child,  his 
adopted  son."  That  is  a  far  pleasanter  pic 
ture  than  the  other  we  saw  just  now  of  Jack- 


42  ANDREW  JACKSON 

son  the  duellist,  but  this  also  is  a  character 
istic  picture,  and  should  go  into  the  gallery ; 
for  Jackson,  like  many  another  man  who  has 
been  denied  children  of  his  own,  was  singu 
larly  tender  with  little  folk.  It  is  certainly 
good  to  be  able  to  think  of  him,  fierce  man 
that  he  was,  as  turning  from  fondling  a  child 
to  enter  on  his  soldier's  career. 

Mr.  Benton's  account  of  the  matter  is 
)  questioned,  but  it  is  certain  that  Jackson 
offered  his  services,  with  those  of  2500  vol 
unteers,  immediately  after  the  declaration 
of  war.  The  government  accepted  the  offer, 
but  left  him  in  idleness  until  October,  1812, 
when  the  governor  of  Tennessee  was  asked 
for  volunteers,  ostensibly  to  reinforce  Gen 
eral  Wilkinson  at  New  Orleans.  The  gov 
ernor  in  turn  called  upon  General  Jackson, 
and  he,  setting  to  work  with  the  utmost 
enthusiasm,  issued  to  the  volunteers  the  first 
of  those  eminently  Jacksonian  addresses 
wherewith  he  was  wont  to  hearten  his  fol 
lowers.  On  January  7,  1813,  the  command 
set  forth,  the  infantry  by  river,  the  cavalry, 
under  John  Coffee,  by  land.  By  the  middle 


CONGRESS:  BENCH:  MILITIA        43 

of  February  all  were  united  at  Natchez,  Mis 
sissippi,  where  the  expedition  was  halted 
to  await  further  orders.  Week  after  week 
passed  by,  and  finally,  late  in  March,  to  the 
general's  rage  and  disgust,  he  heard  from 
the  Secretary  of  War  that  the  causes  of  the 
expedition  had  ceased  to  exist,  and  that  he 
was  to  consider  his  command  "  dismissed 
from  the  public  service "  —  and  not  one 
word  as  to  any  provision  for  getting  the 
men  home ! 

Jackson's  resolution  was  instantly  taken 
and  firmly  carried  out.  He  refused  to  dis 
band  the  men  at  Natchez,  and  marched  them 
home,  pledging  his  own  credit  for  the  neces 
sary  expenses.  His  course  commanded  the 
approval  of  the  State  and  won  him  the  de 
votion  of  the  men.  It  was  the  first  of  many 
occasions  on  which,  while  acting  as  a  military 
officer,  he  dared  to  do  the  thing  he  thought 
to  be  right,  no  matter  how  irregular  it  was. 
On  the  journey  home,  his  soldierly  behavior 
in  trying  circumstances  won  him  his  famous 
nickname.  The  men  spoke  of  him  as  being 
"  tough  as  hickory,"  and  so  came  to  call  him 


44  ANDREW  JACKSON 

"  Hickory,"  and  finally,  with  affection, "  Old 
Hickory."  Before  he  reached  Nashville  he 
again  offered  his  command  for  service  in 
Canada,  but  no  reply  came.  In  May,  he 
dismissed  it,  and  it  seemed  as  if  he  were  not 
going  to  have  any  soldier's  career  at  all. 

Benton,  who  had  served  in  the  expedition 
as  an  aid,  went  to  Washington  and  with  diffi 
culty  persuaded  the  War  Department  to  pay 
the  expenses  of  the  march  from  Natchez. 
When  he  returned  to  Nashville,  it  was  to 
find  that  in  a  duel  between  Jesse  Benton, 
his  brother,  and  one  Carroll,  the  general  had 
acted  as  Carroll's  second.  A  bitter  quarrel 
between  Jackson  and  the  Bentons  followed ; 
before  it  ended,  Jackson  swore  "  by  the 
Eternal  "  he  would  horsewhip  Thomas  Ben- 
ton  on  sight.  They  met  at  a  Nashville 
hotel.  Jesse  Benton  was  there,  and  also  John 
Coffee  and  Stokeley  Hays,  friends  of  Jack 
son's.  There  was  a  rough-and-tumble  fight. 
Thomas  Benton  fell  down  a  stairway  ;  Jesse 
Benton  was  stabbed ;  Jackson  was  shot  in 
the  shoulder  and  severely  wounded.  He 
was  put  to  bed  in  the  old  Nashville  Inn,  a 


CONGRESS:  BENCH:  MILITIA         43 

famous  hostelry  of  the  time,  and  while  he 
lay  helpless  from  a  wound  so  ignobly  won, 
the  call  was  on  its  way  which  should  at  last 
summon  him  to  the  work  for  which  he  was 
fittest.  He  was  to  pass  from  an  action  such 
as  no  biographer  can  defend  to  deeds  which 
none  can  fail  to  praise.  Jackson  the  duel 
list  must  give  place  to  Jackson  the  soldier. 
Yet  all  fighting  is  akin,  and  it  was  but  a 
change  of  scene  and  purpose  that  turned 
the  man  of  the  tavern  brawl  into  the  man 
of  The  Horseshoe  and  New  Orleans ;  for  it 
happened  that  there  was  nowhere  in  the 
Southwest,  perhaps  nowhere  in  the  country, 
any  other  man  quite  so  sure  to  have  his 
way,  whether  in  a  street  fight  or  in  a  battle. 


Ill 

TOHOPEKA   AND   PENSACOLA 

THE  call  that  now  came  to  Jackson  was 
chiefly  due  to  a  very  picturesque  character 
of  the  times  :  the  man  who  is  said  to  have 
been  the  only  rival  of  Burr  and  Jackson  in 
the  impression  he  made  upon  all  beholders 
by  his  manner  and  bearing.  The  call  came, 
indeed,  from  the  southward,  but  probably  it 
would  never  have  come  but  for  the  work  of 
Tecumseh  (or  Tecumthe),  the  famous  Shaw- 
nee  warrior  and  orator,  whose  home  was  in 
the  Northwest.  For  years  Tecumseh  had 
been  striving  to  unite  the  red  men  of  the 
West  and  South  in  a  supreme  effort  to 
roll  back  the  swelling  tide  of  white  immi 
gration.  In  1811  he  made  a  pilgrimage  to 
the  southern  tribes,  and  his  most  fervent 
appeal  was  to  that  powerful  body  of  Indians 
known  as  the  Creek  Confederacy,  who  lived 
in  what  is  now  the  eastern  part  of  Alabama 


TOHOPEKA  AND  PENSACOLA    47 

and  the  southwestern  part  of  Georgia. 
These  proud  and  warlike  Indians  were 
divided  into  two  branches.  The  Upper 
Creeks  had  their  homes  along  the  Coosa  and 
Tallapoosa  rivers,  and  their  villages  extended 
some  distance  down  the  Alabama,  which  is 
formed  by  the  junction  of  those  two  streams. 
The  Lower  Creek  towns  were  on  both  sides 
of  the  Chattahoochee,  which  now  separates 
southern  Georgia  from  southern  Alabamao 
The  so-called  Confederacy,  a  loose  sort  of 
alliance,  claimed  for  a  hunting  ground  the 
lands  extending  westward  to  the  watershed 
between  the  Alabama  and  Tombigbee  rivers, 
which  unite  to  form  the  Mobile.  But  in 
the  fork  of  these  two  rivers  and  along  the 
f  Mobile  and  the  Tombigbee  were  growing 
settlements  of  white  men.  The  growth  of 
these  settlements  was  watched  with  disfavor 
and  suspicion  by  the  Creeks.  A  strong  party, 
the  Red  Sticks,  or  hostiles,  listened  readily 
to  Tecumseh's  teaching.  When  he  left  for 
his  home  in  the  distant  Northwest  many  were 
already  dancing  the  "  war-dance  of  the 
Lakes." 


48  ANDREW  JACKSON 

The  outbreak  of  the  war  with  England 
came  in  good  time  for  Tecnmseh's  plans. 
He  at  once  put  himself  in  alliance  with  the 
British,  and  in  the  summer  of  1813  the 
Creek  Eed  Sticks  heard  that  they  could  get 
arms  and  ammunition  at  Pensacola,  the  cap 
ital  of  Spanish  Florida.  Spain  was  at  peace 
with  the  United  States,  but  Red  Sticks 
were  seen  thronging  to  Pensacola  and  re 
turning  with  arms  and  ammunition.  The 
whites  of  the  Mobile  and  Tombigbee 
country,  then  part  of  Mississippi  Territory, 
organized  for  defence,  waylaid  a  party  re 
turning  from  Pensacola,  and  were  at  first 
victorious,  then  defeated,  in  the  so-called 
Battle  of  Burnt  Corn.  Thoroughly  alarmed, 
the  settlers  now  took  refuge  in  stockades 
and  forts.  The  military  authorities  of 
the  United  States  made  ready  to  defend 
Mobile,  but  recently  seized  from  the  Span 
iards.  At  Fort  Mims,  near  the  point  where 
the  Alabama  and  Tombigbee  form  the 
Mobile,  five  hundred  and  fifty-three  men, 
women,  and  children  were  pent  up  in  an  ill- 
planned  inclosure,  defended  by  a  small  force 


TOHOPEKA  AND  PENSACOLA    49 

under  an  incompetent  though  courageous 
officer  named  Beasley.  On  the  morning  of 
August  30,  1813,  Beasley  was  writing  to 
his  superior,  General  Claiborne,  that  he 
could  hold  the  fort  against  any  number  of 
the  enemy.  At  that  very  moment  a  thousand 
warriors  lay  hidden  in  a  ravine  but  a  few 
hundred  yards  from  the  open  gate  of  the 
stockade.  Their  principal  leader  was  William 
Weatherford,  "  the  Red  Eagle,"  a  half-breed 
of  much  intelligence  and  dauntless  courage. 
At  noon,  when  the  drums  beat  the  garrison 
to  dinner,  the  Indians  rushed  to  the  attack. 
At  the  end  of  the  hot  August  day  there  re 
mained  of  the  fort  but  a  smouldering  heap  of 
ruins,  ghastly  with  human  bodies.  Only  a 
handful  of  the  inmates  escaped  to  spread  the 
horrible  news  among  the  terrified  settlers. 
Swift  runners  set  off  eastward,  westward, 
and  northward  for  help.  A  shudder  ran 
over  the  whole  country.  The  Southwest 
turned  from  the  remoter  events  of  the  war 
in  Canada  to  the  disaster  at  home.  "  The 
Creeks!"  " Weatherf ord ! "  "Fort Minis!" 
were  the  words  on  everybody's  lips,  while 


50  ANDREW  JACKSON 

the  major-general  of  the  Tennessee  militia 
still  lay  helpless  from  his  shameful  wound. 

From  Mississippi  on  the  west,  from 
Georgia  on  the  east,  and  from  Tennessee 
on  the  north,  volunteer  armies  were  soon 
on  the  march  for  the  Creek  country.  Ten 
nessee,  indeed,  sent  two  different  bodies  of 
men.  One  came  from  East  Tennessee,  com 
manded  by  General  John  Cocke ;  the  other 
came  from  West  Tennessee,  and  at  its  head, 
pale  and  weak,  his  arm  in  a  sling,  his  shoul 
der  too  sore  to  bear  the  weight  of  an  epau 
lette,  was  Andrew  Jackson.  He  had  issued 
his  orders  from  his  bed.  When  a  member 
of  the  legislature,  come  to  discuss  the  ex 
pedition  with  him,  expressed  regret  that  he 
would  not  be  able  to  lead  it,  the  sick  man 
muttered,  with  the  inevitable  oath,  that  he 
would  lead  it.  But  from  the  beginning  to 
the  end  of  his  military  service  he  was  pay 
ing  the  penalty,  not  merely  of  the  quarrel 
ing  which  had  brought  him  wounds,  but  of 
intemperate  eating  and  drinking,  which  had 
ruined  his  digestion.  Sometimes  he  was 
tortured  for  hours  with  pains  that  could  be 


TOHOPEKA  AND  PENSACOLA    51 

relieved  only  by  hanging  his  body,  like  a 
garment  hung  to  dry,  face  downward,  over 
the  back  of  a  chair,  or,  if  he  were  on  the 
march,  over  a  sapling  stripped  and  bent  for 
the  purpose. 

By  the  second  week  in  October,  Jackson 
was  at  Huntsville,  on  the  Tennessee  River. 
The  entire  command  numbered  about  2700. 
Its  supplies  were  to  come  by  water  from 
Knoxville,  in  East  Tennessee,  but  the  upper 
part  of  the  river  was  not  navigable  by  reason 
of  the  dryness  of  the  season.  Jackson 
stormed  at  the  delay,  but  used  the  time  in 
drilling  his  men  and  scouring  the  country 
with  Coffee's  cavalry.  Then  he  cut  his  way 
over  the  mountains  to  a  higher  point  on  the 
river,  hoping  to  find  the  supplies.  His 
energy  was  great,  but  without  food  he  could 
not,  as  he  desired,  dash  at  once  into  the 
enemy's  country.  He  moved  southward 
when  he  had  food,  halted  when  it  gave  out, 
and  finally  reached  the  Coosa.  From  his 
camp  there,  which  he  named  Fort  Strother, 
he  dispatched  Coffee  to  strike  a  first  blow 
against  the  Creek  town  of  Tallusahatchee. 


52  ANDREW  JACKSON 

Coffee  destroyed  the  town,  and  not  a  war 
rior  escaped,  for  the  whites  were  bitterly 
revengeful.  A  slain  mother  embracing  a 
living  infant  was  found  among  the  dead. 
Jackson  himself  took  care  of  the  child,  sent 
it  to  The  Hermitage,  and  he  and  his  wife 
reared  it  to  manhood. 

The  next  blow  was  struck  at  Talladega, 
thirty  miles  below  Fort  Strother,  where  a 
body  of  friendly  Indians  were  besieged  by 
a  larger  body  of  Red  Sticks.  Relying  on 
General  White,  who  was  in  the  neighbor 
hood  with  a  force  of  Cocke's  East  Tennes- 
seans,  to  protect  Fort  Strother,  Jackson 
marched  by  night  to  Talladega.  There, 
however,  a  dispatch  reached  him  from 
White,  who  announced  that  he  must  return 
to  Cocke.  So  at  sunrise  Jackson  threw 
himself  on  the  enemy,  routed  him  with  great 
loss,  relieved  the  friendly  Indians,  and  then 
marched  back  to  camp,  to  find  no  provisions, 
and  the  sick  and  wounded  as  hungry  as  the 
rest.  From  that  time  the  struggle  with  fam 
ine  was  for  weeks  his  principal  business.  Ill 
as  he  was,  he  and  his  officers  would  have 


TOHOPEKA  AND  PENSACOLA    53 

nothing  the  men  could  not  have.  A  soldier 
coming  to  him  to  beg  for  food,  he  thrust  his 
hand  into  his  pocket,  drew  out  some  acorns, 
and  courteously  invited  the  man  to  share  his 
dinner. 

Jackson  was  disposed  to  blame  General 
Cocke  for  the  trouble  about  supplies,  be 
cause  Cocke  had  undertaken  to  obtain  sup 
plies  in  Knoxville  for  both  commands ;  but 
it  seems  clear  now  that  Cocke  was  not  to 
blame.  Soon  after  the  battle  of  Talladega 
Jackson's  feeling  against  Cocke  was  strength 
ened.  The  warriors  of  the  Hillabee  towns, 
a  part  of  the  Creek  Confederacy,  sent  a  mes 
senger  to  Jackson  to  sue  for  peace.  He 
gave  them  his  terms,  and  the  messenger  was 
returning  to  the  Hillabees  when  General 
White,  of  Cocke's  command,  ignorant  of 
what  was  going  on,  marched  upon  a  Hilla 
bee  town,  killed  many  of  the  warriors,  and 
captured  the  women  and  children.  Jackson, 
grieved  and  enraged  at  a  blunder  which  prob 
ably  prolonged  the  war  and  certainly  made 
it  fiercer,  was  easily  persuaded  that  Cocke, 
his  inferior  officer,  was  trying  to  win  laurels 


54  ANDREW  JACKSON 

for  himself,  and  in  the  end  his  anger  led  him 
to  do  grave  injustice  to  a  man  who  appears 
to  have  been  faithful  and  honorable. 

And  now  for  ten  weeks  the  will  of  An 
drew  Jackson  was  tried  to  the  uttermost. 
His  starving  troops  were  constantly  on  the 
verge  of  mutiny.  The  command  was  made 
up  of  two  classes,  —  the  militia,  called  into 
service  against  the  Indians,  and  the  volun 
teers,  who  had  first  enlisted  for  the  expedi 
tion  down  the  Mississippi.  The  militia,  dis 
heartened,  started  for  Tennessee.  Jackson 
drew  up  the  volunteers  across  their  path 
way,  and  drove  them  back  to  camp.  Then 
the  volunteers,  in  their  turn,  prepared  to 
move  northward,  and  he  stopped  them  with 
the  militia.  The  mounted  men  were  per 
mitted  to  go  to  Huntsville  to  get  food  for 
their  horses,  and  most  of  them  went  on  to 
their  homes.  The  infantry,  sullen  and  dis 
trustful,  were  kept  in  camp  only  by  the  pro 
mise  that  in  two  days  supplies  would  come 
from  Nashville,  whither  Jackson  was  send 
ing  letter  after  letter  to  stir  up  the  authori 
ties.  At  the  end  of  two  days  nothing  had 


TOHOPEKA  AND  PENSACOLA    55 

come.  A  few  brave  men  volunteered  to  de 
fend  the  camp  while  with  the  rest  the  gen 
eral  marched  northward  in  search  of  food. 
The  supplies  soon  came  in  sight,  and  the 
men  were  fed ;  but  now  they  refused  to  go 
back  to  camp,  and  again  turned  northward. 
Jackson,  with  Coffee  and  a  handful  of  others, 
threw  himself  in  front  of  them,  and  with 
blazing  eyes  and  dreadful  oaths  cowed  them 
into  obedience.  Again  they  threatened  mu 
tiny,  and  once  more,  alone,  on  horseback,  a 
musket  in  his  hand,  his  disabled  arm  in  its 
sling,  he  faced  them,  and  swore  he  would 
shoot  the  first  man  who  stirred.  They  hesi 
tated,  wavered,  yielded. 

Seeing,  however,  that  nothing  could  be 
done  with  the  volunteers,  Jackson  finally 
permitted  them  to  go,  keeping  with  him  the 
militia  and  a  small  body  of  Cocke's  men.  The 
militia  claimed  that  their  term  would  expire 
January  4,  1814 ;  the  term  of  Cocke's  men 
would  expire  a  week  later.  Anxiously  await 
ing  reinforcements,  Jackson  got,  instead,  a 
letter  from  Governor  Blount  advising  him 
to  give  up  the  struggle.  But  he  would  not 


56  ANDREW  JACKSON 

give  up ;  his  magnificent  spirit  rose  higher 
with  every  blow.  He  wrote  the  governor 
a  letter  that  taught  him  his  duty.  Through 
the  governor,  in  fact,  that  letter  roused  the 
whole  State,  and  soon  a  new  army  was  on 
the  way  from  West  Tennessee,  while  Cocke 
was  marching  another  force  southward  from 
East  Tennessee.  With  some  five  hundred 
raw  recruits  that  reached  him  before  Cocke's 
first  command  left,  Jackson  held  Fort  Stro- 
ther.  He  even  ventured  to  make  a  raid  into 
the  enemy's  country,  aiming  at  the  town  of 
Emuckfau.  The  Indians  attacked  him.  He 
repulsed  them,  but  soon  made  up  his  mind 
to  return.  On  his  way  back,  he  was  again 
attacked  while  crossing  a  creek,  his  rear 
guard  was  driven  in,  and  for  a  moment  a 
panic  and  rout  was  imminent.  But  the 
valor  of  a  few  men  saved  the  army,  and  he 
got  safely  back  to  Fort  Strother. 

He  did  not  move  again  until  the  middle 
of  March,  and  then  he  had  five  thousand 
men.  Cocke,  for  a  speech  addressed  to  his 
troops  when  they  threatened  mutiny,  was 
sent  to  Nashville  under  arrest.  To  stamp 


TOHOPEKA  AND  PENSACOLA    57 

out  insubordination  among  the  men  from 
West  Tennessee,  a  youth  named  Woods, 
who  had  been  found  guilty  of  mutiny,  was 
shot  before  the  whole  army.  The  thirty- 
ninth  regiment  of  regulars  was  now  a  part 
of  the  command,  and  the  general  proposed 
to  use  them,  whenever  occasion  offered,  to 
suppress  insubordination  among  the  volun 
teers.  But  from  this  time  he  had  little  of 
that  to  deal  with,  and  was  free  to  grapple 
with  the  Creeks,  who  had  so  far  held  their 
own  against  the  Georgians  and  Mississip- 
pians. 

The  centre  of  their  resistance  was  the 
Hickory  Ground,  near  the  fork  of  the  Coosa 
and  Tallapoosa;  but  the  final  blow  was 
struck  at  a  bend  in  the  Tallapoosa  midway 
between  its  source  and  mouth.  The  spot 
was  called  by  the  Indians  Tohopeka ;  by  the 
whites,  The  Horseshoe.  Across  the  neck 
of  a  small  peninsula  the  hostiles  had  thrown 
up  a  rough  line  of  breastworks.  On  the 
banks  of  the  river  they  had  gathered  a  num 
ber  of  canoes.  Within  the  defences  was  a 
force  of  Ked  Sticks  estimated  at  nine  hun- 


58  ANDREW  JACKSON 

dred,  and  several  hundred  women  and  chil 
dren. 

Jackson  moved  down  the  Coosa  to  a  point 
nearly  even  with  Tohopeka,  established  a 
new  camp,  and  by  the  evening  of  March  28 
he  was  in  front  of  the  enemy  with  about 
three  thousand  men,  including  a  considerable 
body  of  friendly  Indians.  Resolving  to  make 
thorough  work  of  it,  he  dispatched  Coffee, 
with  the  friendly  Indians  and  the  cavalry, 
to  surround  the  bend  on  the  opposite  bank. 
The  next  morning,  with  the  artillery,  he 
opened  fire  on  the  breastworks.  Coffee, 
meantime,  threw  a  force  across  the  river  and 
attacked  the  enemy  from  the  rear.  The  line 
of  breastworks  was  carried  by  assault.  The 
slaughter  of  Creeks  was  dreadful.  As  usual, 
they  fought  to  the  last.  Five  hundred  and 
fifty-seven  bodies  were  found  in  the  bend, 
and  many  perished  trying  to  escape  across 
the  river.  Jackson's  loss  was  about  two 
hundred  killed  and  wounded. 

Tohopeka  broke  down  the  organized  resist 
ance  of  the  Indians.  When  Jackson,  a 
few  days  later,  turned  southward,  he  was 


TOHOPEKA  AND  PENSACOLA    59 

able  to  march  on  to  the  Hickory  Ground 
without  fighting  another  battle.  The  Red 
Sticks  for  the  most  part  fled  to  their  kin 
dred,  the  Seminoles,  in  Florida;  but  some 
came  in  and  submitted  to  the  iron  hand 
which  had  crushed  them.  Jackson  had  been 
at  the  Hickory  Ground  but  a  short  time  when 
Weatherford  himself  came  in  and  surren 
dered.  Some  of  the  men,  remembering  Fort 
Mims,  would  have  done  violence  to  the  fallen 
chief,  but  Jackson  protected  him.  Soon 
afterwards,  General  Pinckney,  of  the  regular 
army,  arrived  at  Fort  Jackson,  which  had 
been  built  in  the  river  fork,  and  took  com 
mand.  When  he  ordered  the  Tennesseans 
to  return  to  their  homes,  Jackson  went  with 
them,  and  his  fellow  citizens  at  Nashville 
gave  him  the  first  of  many  triumphal  recep 
tions.  His  eight  months'  work  in  the  wilder 
ness  had  made  him  easily  the  first  man  of 
Tennessee.  Georgia  had  had  a  better  chance 
than  Tennessee  to  crush  the  Indians,  for  the 
distance  and  the  natural  obstacles  were  less  ; 
but  Georgia  had  no  such  leader  as  Andrew 
Jackson.  Another  reward  soon  reached  him. 


60  ANDREW  JACKSON 

In  May,  General  William  Henry  Harrison 
resigned  his  commission,  and  in  his  place 
Jackson  was  appointed  major-general  in  the 
army  of  the  United  States.  He  was  put 
in  command  of  the  southwestern  district, 
including  Mobile  and  New  Orleans. 

But  on  his  way  to  his  post  he  had  to  stop 
again  at  Fort  Jackson  and  complete  his  work 
among  the  Creeks.  Acting  under  orders 
from  the  government,  he  compelled  the 
chiefs  there  assembled,  practically  all  of 
whom  had  been  friendly  to  the  United  States 
during  the  war,  to  sign  an  "agreement  and 
capitulation "  by  which  they  ceded  to  the 
United  States  all  the  land  which  they  had 
claimed  to  the  west  of  the  Coosa.  He  car 
ried  the  matter  through  with  a  high  hand, 
but  the  Creeks  themselves  admired  him  and 
put  into  the  agreement  a  cession  of  land  to 
himself.  It  was,  of  course,  not  permissible 
for  a  negotiator  to  accept  such  a  gift  from 
the  other  party.  However,  the  land  was  part 
of  the  region  claimed  by  the  United  States 
and  surrendered  by  the  Creeks,  and  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  Jackson  never  got  possession 


TOHOPEKA  AND  PENSACOLA    61 

of  it.  This  "  treaty,"  as  it  was  improperly 
called,  was  signed  August  9, 1814,  and  then 
Jackson  was  free  to  take  up  his  new  duties 
as  the  defender  of  the  Southwest  against  the 
British. 

Up  to  this  time,  except  for  the  war  with 
the  Creeks  and  the  bloodless  capture  of 
Mobile,  the  Southwest  had  taken  little  part 
in  the  contest.  On  land,  the  war  had  been 
mainly  an  affair  of  the  North,  where  the 
Americans  had  been  trying  to  wrest  Canada 
from  the  mother  country,  and  of  the  North 
west,  where  the  British  and  the  Indians  had 
taken  the  offensive.  The  death  of  Tecumseh 
at  the  battle  of  the  Thames,  in  November, 
1813,  had  made  an  end  of  that  combination, 
and  General  William  Henry  Harrison  had 
won  some  honor  by  his  management  of  the 
campaign.  But  the  several  attempts  at  in 
vading  Canada  were  neither  successful  nor 
glorious.  On  the  whole,  the  land  campaigns 
of  the  Americans  had  been  utterly  disap 
pointing.  The  little  American  navy  had 
indeed  covered  itself  with  glory,  both  on  the 
high  seas  and  on  the  Great  Lakes  ;  but  from 


62  ANDREW  JACKSON 

the  seas,  where  it  was  vastly  overmatched  by 
Great  Britain's  immense  naval  resources,  it 
had  practically  disappeared  by  the  autumn 
of  1814.  Only  a  few  privateers  still  preyed 
on  British  commerce.  And  now,  by  the 
overthrow  of  Napoleon,  Great  Britain  was 
left  free  to  employ  against  America  all  those 
ships  with  which  Nelson  had  won  for  her  the 
empire  of  the  sea,  and  those  superb  soldiers 
who,  under  Wellington,  had  driven  the 
French  out  of  Spain.  Regiments  of  these 
veterans  were  sent  to  Canada.  In  August, 
an  expedition  under  General  Ross  landed  on 
the  coast  of  Chesapeake  Bay,  defeated  an 
American  force  at  Bladensburg,  took  Wash 
ington,  and  burned  the  capitol  and  the  Presi 
dent's  mansion.  The  enemy  was  stronger 
than  ever,  and  the  United  States  were  at 
the  point  of  exhaustion. 

Moreover,  the  ruling  class  in  one  impor 
tant  section  of  the  country  was  rather 
inclined  to  weaken  than  to  help  the  govern 
ment.  The  Federalist  leaders  in  New  Eng 
land  were  against  the  French,  against  Presi 
dent  Madison,  against  the  war.  They  had 


TOHOPEKA  AND  PENSACOLA    63 

been  in  opposition  ever  since  President  Jef 
ferson  went  into  office  in  1801.  Distrusting 
the  Southwest,  and  opposing  the  expansion 
of  the  country  in  that  direction,  they  had 
talked  about  a  breaking  up  of  the  Union 
when  Louisiana  was  purchased  in  1803,  and 
again  when  the  State  of  Louisiana  was  admit 
ted  in  1811-12.  When  the  war  began,  the 
governors  of  several  New  England  States 
refused  to  turn  their  militia  over  to  the 
Union  generals.  In  1814,  several  legisla 
tures,  the  Massachusetts  legislature  in  the 
lead,  were  arranging  a  convention  to  propose 
far-reaching  changes  in  the  Constitution  of 
the  United  States,  and  many  feared  that  the 
outcome  would  be  the  disruption  of  the 
Union  and  a  separate  New  England  confed 
eration.  True,  New  England  men  were 
fighting  bravely  by  land  and  sea  for  their 
country,  but  the  leading  Federalists  of  New 
England  were,  as  a  rule,  disaffected.  A 
notable  exception  was  John  Quincy  Adams, 
who,  distrusting  the  leaders  of  his  own  party, 
had  gone  over  to  the  party  of  Jefferson. 
The  time  was  now  come  for  the  South- 


64  ANDREW  JACKSON 

west,  the  region  so  long  distrusted,  to  show 
whether  or  not  it  was  loyal  to  the  Union. 
The  British  were  aiming  at  that  quarter  a 
powerful  military  and  naval  force.  Evi 
dently  believing  the  stories  of  disaffection  in 
the  Southwest,  they  had  sent  ahead  of  their 
expedition  printed  invitations  to  the  South 
western  people  to  throw  off  the  yoke  of  the 
Union.  The  Spaniards  of  the  Gulf  coast, 
probably  not  ignorant  of  the  American  de 
signs  on  both  the  Floridas,  and  resenting 
the  seizure  of  Mobile,  were  no  better  than 
passive  allies  of  the  British,  who  were  thus 
enabled  to  use  Pensacola  as  a  base  for  their 
campaign  against  Mobile,  New  Orleans,  and 
the  great  Mississippi  Valley  beyond. 

When  Jackson  reached  Mobile,  in  the 
middle  of  August,  he  was  already  thoroughly 
angered  with  the  Spaniards  for  harboring 
refugee  Creeks  and  giving  them  arms.  He 
had  always  been  in  favor  of  seizing  the 
Floridas ;  that  had  been  the  real  object  of 
the  expedition  down  the  Mississippi  in  1813 
which  he  had  commanded.  The  true  rea 
son  why  he  and  his  army  were  dismissed  at 


TOHOPEKA  AND  PENSACOLA    65 

Natchez  was  that  the  authorities  at  Wash 
ington  had  changed  their  mind  about  seiz 
ing  West  Florida.  In  July,  1814,  he  wrote 
to  Washington  for  permission  to  take  Pen- 
sacola,  but  no  reply  came,  for  the  War  De 
partment  was  occupied  with  General  Eoss. 
The  absurd  conduct  of  a  British  officer,  Colo 
nel  Nichols,  who  was  at  Pensacola  with  a 
force  of  British  and  Indians,  occupying  one 
of  the  two  Spanish  forts  there,  and  issuing 
fiery  proclamations,  was  enough  to  make 
Jackson  act  at  once,  even  if  he  had  hesi 
tated  before.  He  answered  the  colonel's  pro 
clamations  with  others  equally  fiery.  But  he 
had  to  wait  for  troops,  which  were  to  come 
from  the  neighboring  States  of  Tennessee, 
Kentucky,  Georgia,  and  Louisiana.  Mean 
time,  in  September,  a  British  squadron  made 
a  determined  attack  on  Fort  Bowyer,  at  the 
entrance  to  Mobile  Bay,  and  was  repulsed, 
with  the  loss  of  its  flagship,  by  Major  Law 
rence  and  a  small  garrison,  —  a  gallant 
achievement,  which  made  a  good  beginning 
of  the  campaign.  At  the  end  of  October, 
Coffee,  now  a  general  officer,  with  nearly 


66  ANDREW  JACKSON 

three  thousand  Tennesseans,  reached  the 
neighborhood  of  Mobile.  With  these,  and 
about  a  thousand  of  the  regulars  he  had 
already,  Jackson  promptly  marched  on  Pen- 
sacola.  One  of  the  forts,  and  the  city  it 
self,  he  took ;  the  other  fort,  Barrancas,  was 
blown  up  by  the  British  before  he  could 
reach  it.  The  enterprise  kept  him  but  a 
week.  It  was  all  over  before  he  received, 
in  reply  to  his  own  letter  of  July,  a  letter 
from  the  Secretary  of  War  forbidding  him 
to  attack  Pensacola.  Once  again  he  had 
taken  the  responsibility  to  do  what  he  felt 
to  be  necessary. 

By  this  time  the  government  at  Washing 
ton  was  alive  to  the  great  danger  of  the 
Southwest.  Hurried  orders  were  sent  to  the 
governors  of  the  various  States  whose  militia 
must  be  the  main  reliance  for  defence.  It 
was  suspected  that  New  Orleans  would  be 
the  first  objective  of  the  enemy,  and  a  warn 
ing  came  to  the  city  from  Jean  Lafitte,  the 
leader  of  a  gang  of  smugglers,  whom  the 
British  had  tried  to  win  over.  But  the 
warning  was  not  properly  heeded,  and  Jack- 


TOHOPEKA  AND  PENSACOLA    67 

son  himself  was  slow  to  make  up  his  mind 
where  the  enemy  would  strike.  He  lingered 
at  Mobile  until  November  22,  and  four  days 
later  Sir  Edward  Pakenham,  with  a  large 
army  and  a  great  fleet,  sailed  from  Jamaica 
for  New  Orleans.  It  was  not  until  Decem 
ber  2  that  a  worn,  thin  man,  tired  and  ill, 
whom  nobody,  failing  to  observe  the  look  in 
his  eyes,  would  have  taken  for  the  conqueror 
of  the  Creeks,  rode  into  the  curious  little 
city  that  had  been  the  French  and  then  the 
Spanish  capital  of  Louisiana,  and  which  was 
not  yet  half  like  an  American  town.  The 
bulk  of  its  population  was  still  French  Cre 
ole  and  African ;  but  among  the  Americans 
there  was  at  least  one  man  who  already  knew 
something  of  Andrew  Jackson,  and  who  was 
to  know  a  great  deal  more.  The  leader  of 
the  New  Orleans  bar,  and  the  most  active 
of  all  the  citizens  in  making  ready  for  the 
enemy,  was  no  other  than  that  Edward  Liv 
ingston,  who,  with  Duane  and  Burr,  had 
been  friendly  to  the  Tennessee  Congressman 
eighteen  years  before  at  Philadelphia,  ^e 
invited  the  new  commander  to  his  house, 


68  ANDREW  JACKSON 

where  Mrs.  Livingston,  a  social  leader  in 
the  town,  soon  discovered  that  the  Indian 
fighter  knew  perfectly  well  how  to  deport 
himself  in  a  drawing-room. 


IV 

NEW   OKLEANS 

A  GLANCE  at  the  map  will  give  the  reader 
some  idea  of  the  doubts  that  must  have  be 
set  Jackson  concerning  the  point  at  which 
the  enemy  would  probably  attack  New  Or 
leans.  The  island  on  which  the  city  stands 
was  accessible  from  the  sea  by  at  least  three 
general  routes.  The  British  might  approach 
by  the  Mississippi  River,  which  flows  by  the 
city  on  the  west,  or  over  Lake  Pontchar- 
train,  which  stretches  out  to  the  north,  or 
over  Lake  Borgne,  from  the  southeast. 
Jackson  first  inspected  Fort  St.  Philip,  sixty 
miles  below,  on  the  river ;  besides  the  fort, 
there  were,  for  river  defences,  the  schooner 
Carolina  and  the  sloop  Louisiana.  His 
next  move  was  to  Lake  Pontchartrain,  and 
he  was  still  in  that  quarter  when  news 
came  that  the  enemy  had  chosen  the  third 


70  ANDREW  JACKSON 

route  and  was  already  on  Lake  Borgne. 
The  British  found  there  six  American  gun 
boats,  which  were  all  destroyed  or  taken 
after  a  brief  but  gallant  struggle.  That 
was  December  14,  and  New  Orleans  was  not 
yet  in  any  good  posture  of  defence.  The 
most  natural  route  from  the  lake  to  the 
immediate  neighborhood  of  the  city  was  up 
the  Bayou  Bienvenu,  which  led  to  the  south 
ern  end  of  a  level  plain  bounded  on  the 
west  by  the  river  and  on  the  east  by  a  dense 
cypress  swamp.  At  the  northern  end  of  the 
plain  lay  New  Orleans,  and  the  distance  was 
but  six  or  seven  miles;  the  plain  was  in 
most  places  about  a  mile  wide.  Between 
the  head  of  the  bayou  and  the  city  there 
was  not  a  fort  or  even  a  line  of  intrench- 
ments.  For  this  state  of  things  Jackson  has 
not  escaped  blame  from  military  critics. 

But  if  illness  or  any  other  cause  had 
robbed  him  of  his  usual  energy,  the  news  of 
the  disaster  on  Lake  Borgne  was  the  signal 
for  a  change  in  him  and  in  the  situation. 
Coffee,  with  part  of  the  Tennessee  volunteers, 
was  up  the  river  at  Baton  Rouge.  A  hurried 


NEW  ORLEANS  71 

summons  brought  him  a  hundred  and  twenty 
miles  in  two  days,  and  on  the  19th  he  was 
in  camp  a  few  miles  above  the  city  with 
eight  hundred  men.  Two  days  later  came 
General  Carroll  and  a  brigade  of  Tennessee 
militia,  two  thousand  strong ;  with  them 
came  also  a  squadron  of  mounted  Missis 
sippi  volunteers.  Louisiana  furnished  a 
thousand  militia ;  the  city  of  New  Orleans 
five  or  six  hundred  volunteers,  of  whom 
about  a  third  were  mulattoes.  Jackson  had 
also  two  incomplete  regiments  of  regulars 
numbering  together  about  eight  hundred 
rank  and  file.  A  Kentucky  brigade  of 
twenty-five  hundred  men  was  on  the  way, 
but  without  arms.  Of  Carroll's  men,  only 
one  in  ten  had  a  musket.  To  provide  arms 
for  these  new  troops  was  a  difficult  matter, 
and  many  of  the  Kentuckians  were  still 
unarmed  when  the  final  struggle  came.  The 
city  became  panic-stricken  and  disorderly, 
and  Jackson  promptly  placed  it  under  mar 
tial  law. 

Such  was  the  situation  when,  on  the  morn 
ing  of   December  23,  the  British  advance 


72  ANDREW  JACKSON 

party,  numbering  about  seventeen  hundred, 
conveyed  in  small  boats  over  the  shallow 
Lake  Borgne  and  up  the  Bienvenu,  landed 
six  miles  below  the  city  and  seized  the  man 
sion  of  Major  Villere,  a  Creole  gentleman  of 
the  neighborhood.  Villere  was  captured,  but 
escaped,  and  at  half  past  one  o'clock  Jack 
son  knew  in  New  Orleans  that  the  enemy 
was  at  hand.  By  good  luck,  Major  Latour, 
a  French  engineer,  and  the  best  historian  of 
the  campaign,  was  among  the  first  to  view 
the  invaders,  and  he  gave  the  general  a  cor 
rect  idea  of  their  position  and  numbers.  As 
in  all  other  crises,  Jackson's  resolve  was 
taken  at  once.  "By  the  Eternal,"  he  ex 
claimed,  "  they  shall  not  sleep  on  our  soil !  " 
He  set  his  troops  in  motion  for  a  night  at 
tack. 

Had  the  British  marched  on  to  New 
Orleans  without  stopping,  it  seems  probable 
that  they  would  have  taken  it  that  evening. 
But  at  nightfall  upwards  of  two  thousand 
Americans  were  between  them  and  the  city. 
Jackson  was  on  the  American  right,  near  the 
river,  with  the  regulars  and  the  Louisiana 


NEW  ORLEANS  73 

contingent.  Coffee,  with  his  Teunesseans 
and  the  Mississippi  horsemen,  was  on  the 
left,  next  the  cypress  swamp.  Carroll's 
brigade  and  the  city  militia  were  left  to 
guard  New  Orleans  on  the  north.  The 
Carolina  had  crept  down  the  river  opposite 
the  enemy's  position,  and  at  half  past  seven 
one  of  her  guns  gave  the  signal  for  attack. 

What  followed,  in  the  fog  and  darkness, 
is  not  clearly  known.  The  British  were  sur 
prised  ;  but  British  soldiers  are  proverbially 
hard  to  drive  from  their  own  position.  The 
Americans  had  the  advantage  of  making 
the  attack;  but  they  were  nearly  all  raw 
troops.  Each  side  was  confused  and  un 
certain  of  its  own  and  the  enemy's  position. 
Coffee,  on  the  left,  drove  the  British  back 
towards  the  river,  where  they  were  pro 
tected  by  an  old  levee,  while  the  new  levee 
on  the  bank  shielded  them  from  the  Louisi 
ana's  fire.  On  the  right,  the  Americans 
were  repulsed.  Reinforcements  reached  the 
British  •"•army  during  the  action.  At  half 
past  nine  the  attack  ceased.  The  enemy 
lost  two  hundred  and  sixty-seven  killed, 


74  ANDREW  JACKSON 

wounded,  and  missing ;  the  Americans,  two 
hundred  and  thirteen.  The  night  attack, 
however,  strengthened  the  Americans.  The 
enemy,  overrating  Jackson's  force,  became  too 
cautious  to  advance  at  once,  but  waited  until 
the  entire  army  should  be  landed.  The 
Americans  gained  time  to  build  defenses. 

Jackson  chose  a  line  two  miles  above  the 
battlefield,  marked  by  a  shallow  canal  or 
ditch  which  crossed  the  plain  at  its  narrow 
est  point,  from  the  swamp  to  the  river. 
Behind  the  ditch  he  threw  up  a  parapet.  In 
some  places  cotton  bales  were  used,  for  the 
soil  was  but  three  feet  deep ;  at  that  depth 
one  found  water,  as  indeed  one  found  water 
almost  everywhere,  —  in  the  foggy  air,  in  the 
bayous,  the  river,  the  swamps,  of  that  low 
land  about  New  Orleans.  In  a  few  days 
Jackson's  arrangements  for  defence  were 
completed.  Fifteen  guns  were  disposed  at  in 
tervals  along  the  line,  some  of  them  manned 
by  Lafitte  and  his  buccaneers.  The  whole 
force  numbered  about  three  thousand,  and 
the  Kentuckians,  though  not  all  armed,  were 
used  as  a  reserve.  On  the  river  the  Loui- 


NEW  ORLEANS  75 

siana  and  the  Carolina  gave  the  enemy  much 
trouble. 

The  British  army,  when  completely  dis 
embarked,  seemed  to  justify  the  Duke  of 
Wellington's  confidence  that  it  could  rout 
any  American  army  he  ever  heard  of.  Seven 
thousand  trained  British  soldiers,  seamen, 
and  marines,  and  a  thousand  West  Indian 
blacks,  were  assembled  at  Villere's  planta 
tion,  with  from  twenty-five  to  thirty  guns. 
There  were  regiments  which  had  helped 
Wellington  to  win  Talavera,  Salamanca,  and 
Vitoria,  and  within  a  few  short  months  some 
of  these  same  regiments  were  to  stand  at 
Waterloo  in  that  thin  red  line  which  Ney 
and  Napoleon's  guard  could  never  break. 
Their  general,  Pakenham,  Wellington's  bro 
ther-in-law,  was  a  distinguished  pupil  of  his 
illustrious  kinsman.  Could  frontiersmen  who 
had  never  fought  together  before,  who  had 
never  seen  the  face  of  a  civilized  foe,  with 
stand  the  conquerors  of  Napoleon  ?  But  two 
branches  of  the  same  stubborn  race  were 
represented  on  that  little  watery  plain.  The 
soldiers  trained  to  serve  the  strongest  will  in 


76  ANDREW  JACKSON 

the  Old  World  were  face  to  face  with  the 
rough  and  ready  yeomanry  embattled  for 
defence  by  the  one  man  of  the  New  World 
whose  soul  had  most  of  iron  in  it.  It  was 
Salamanca  against  Tohopeka,  discipline 
against  individual  alertness,  the  Briton  of 
the  little  Isle  against  the  Briton  of  the 
wastes  and  wilds.  But  there  was  one  great 
difference.  Wellington,  "the  Iron  Duke," 
was  not  there;  "Old  Hickory"  was  every 
where  along  the  American  lines.  A  grave 
and  moderate  historian,  comparing  the  de 
fense  of  New  Orleans  with  the  defence  of 
Washington,  finds  the  two  situations  not 
unlike.  "  The  principal  difference,"  he  re 
marks,  "  was  that  Jackson  commanded." 

Pakenham's  first  concern  was  to  get  rid 
of  the  Carolina  and  the  Louisiana.  Heavy 
guns  were  with  great  labor  hauled  from  the 
fleet,  and  on  December  27  the  Carolina's 
crew  were  forced  to  abandon  her,  and  the 
Louisiana  was  with  difficulty  got  out  of 
range ;  but  meanwhile  Commodore  Patter 
son  had  mounted  a  battery  across  the  river 
which  in  a  measure  made  up  for  the  ships. 


NEW  ORLEANS  77 

On  the  28th,  Pakenham  advanced  with  his 
whole  army,  but  retired,  without  making  any 
assault,  to  await  the  result  of  an  artillery 
duel.  This  was  fought  on  New  Year's  day, 
1815.  The  British  used  at  least  twenty- 
four  guns,  throwing  some  three  hundred 
and  fifty  pounds  of  metal ;  the  Americans, 
fifteen  guns,  throwing  two  hundred  and 
twenty-four  pounds.  On  both  sides  novel 
defences  were  employed,  —  cotton  bales  by 
the  Americans,  barrels  of  sugar  by  the  Brit 
ish.  The  bales  quickly  caught  fire,  and  from 
that  tune  were  discarded ;  the  barrels  proved 
as  useless  as  if  they  had  been  empty.  The 
result  of  the  action  would  have  been  utterly 
surprising  but  for  the  discovery  already 
made  in  Canada  that  Americans  were  better 
marksmen  than  British  regulars.  Three 
American  guns  were  damaged ;  every  one 
of  the  British  batteries  was  silenced  and 
abandoned.  The  American  loss  was  thirty- 
four  killed  and  wounded ;  the  British,  some 
what  heavier. 

Pakenham   waited   a  week   for   General 
Lambert  to  come  up  with  two  of  his  regi- 


78  ANDREW  JACKSON 

ments,  and  then  made  his  supreme  effort. 
His  plan  was  to  advance  on  both  sides  of 
the  river.  During  the  night  of  January  7, 
Colonel  Thornton,  with  1200  men,  was 
thrown  across  to  the  left  bank,  where  Gen 
eral  David  Morgan  had  450  Louisiana  mili 
tia,  reinforced  at  the  last  moment  by  four 
hundred  Kentuckians.  Both  British  divi 
sions  were  to  attack  before  dawn.  But  the 
dawn  came  before  Thornton  was  ready.  He 
was,  however,  successful  in  his  part  of  the 
programme.  Morgan  was  driven  back,  his 
guns  taken,  and  the  British  on  the  west  bank 
passed  up  the  river  a  mile  beyond  Jackson's 
line.  Jackson  never  forgave  the  Kentuck 
ians,  although  military  critics  incline  to  think 
they  did  all  that  should  have  been  expected. 
But  on  the  east  bank  it  was  a  different 
story.  At  six  o'clock  the  main  body  of 
the  British  rushed  upon  the  American  lines. 
General  Gibbs,  with  2200,  sought  to  pierce 
the  defenses  near  the  swamp.  General 
Keane  led  1200  along  the  river  bank.  Gen 
eral  Lambert,  with  the  reserve,  brought  up 
the  rear.  The  whole  force  engaged  was  over 


NEW  ORLEANS  79 

5000.  Gibbs  first  came  under  the  Ameri 
can  fire.  The  head  of  his  division  melted 
before  it.  Gibbs  himself  fell,  mortally 
wounded.  Pakenharn,  dashing  forward  to 
rally  the  column,  was  killed  three  hundred 
yards  from  the  lines.  Keane,  on  the  British 
left,  was  wounded  and  carried  from  the  field. 
Nowhere  did  the  enemy  pierce  or  break  the 
line  of  defense.  A  brave  major  did  indeed 
cross  the  ditch  and  lift  his  head  above  the 
breastworks;  but  he  lived  only  long  enough 
to  send  back  word  that  he  died  on  the  para 
pet  like  an  English  soldier.  In  truth,  Pak- 
enham's  assault  was  a  desperate  venture, 
such  as  British  commanders,  relying  on  the 
valor  of  their  men,  have  been  too  often  led 
to  make.  At  eight  o'clock  Jackson  walked 
from  end  to  end  of  his  works,  and  not  a 
British  soldier  was  anywhere  to  be  seen  in 
an  attitude  of  offence.  The  smoke  of  the 
artillery,  clearing,  discovered  the  enemy  far 
distant,  in  full  retreat  to  his  camp,  and  the 
battlefield  littered  with  piles  of  dead  and 
wounded.  "  I  saw,"  said  Jackson,  "  more 
than  five  hundred  Britons  emerging  from 


80  ANDREW  JACKSON 

the  heaps  of  their  dead  comrades,  all  over 
the  plain,  rising  up,  and  still  more  distinctly 
visible  as  the  field  became  clearer,  coming 
forward  and  surrendering  to  our  soldiers." 

Here  was  revenge,  indeed,  for  the  suffer 
ings  of  little  Andy  in  the  Waxhaws,  for 
the  sabre  cut  on  his  head,  for  his  brothers, 
for  his  mother.  But  it  is  not  known  that 
any  low  word  of  vengeance  passed  his  lips 
at  the  awful  sight  before  him.  The  British 
dead  were  seven  hundred,  their  wounded 
twice  as  many,  and  five  hundred  were  taken. 
In  the  American  lines  on  that  side  of  the 
river  eight  were  killed  and  thirteen  wounded. 
Such  a  victory,  so  cheaply  bought,  is  not 
paralleled  in  the  warfare  of  civilized  men. 
Lambert,  succeeding  Pakenham,  recalled 
Thornton  and  gave  up  the  important  advan 
tage  the  British  won  on  the  western  bank. 
For  ten  days  the  armies  lay  as  they  were, 
and  then  the  enemy  withdrew  as  he  had 
come.  A  few  days  later,  Fort  Bowyer,  on 
Mobile  Point,  was  taken,  and  then  the  fight 
ing  ceased. 

During  the  closing  weeks  of  January,  by 


NEW  ORLEANS  81 

the  slow  methods  of  travel  prevalent  in  those 
days,  three  messengers  were  hastening  to 
AVashington  with  tidings  which  the  wearied 
President  awaited  with  eagerness  or  fear 
according  to  the  quarter  from  which  they 
came.  From  Hartford,  Conn.,  where  the 
convention  of  New  England  malcontents  had 
sat,  he  was  to  learn  what  demands  wrere  made 
by  Americans  who  chose  a  time  of  war  to 
change  and  weaken,  if  not  indeed  to  destroy, 
the  constitution  of  their  country.  From  the 
American  commissioners  at  Ghent  he  hoped 
against  hope  for  news  of  a  peace.  To  the 
Southwest  he  looked  with  dread,  for  few  had 
dared  to  believe  that  New  Orleans  could  be 
defended.  The  three  messages  arrived  al 
most  together,  and  all  three  were  to  stick  in 
men's  minds  for  years  to  come,  and  to  mould 
men's  thoughts  about  their  country.  From 
Ghent  came  tidings  of  a  peace,  not,  indeed, 
glorious,  or  such  as  we  had  gone  to  war  to 
win,  but  better  than  we  had  a  right  to  expect. 
From  New  Orleans,  tidings  of  a  victory  so 
splendid  that  it  stirred  the  blood  and  bright 
ened  the  eyes  of  every  true  American,  and 


82  ANDREW  JACKSON 

made  it  hard  to  remember  that  the  war  had 
not  been  altogether  glorious.  The  threaten 
ing  message  from  Hartford  lost  its  terrors. 
In  the  great  balance  of  the  sections,  the 
Northeast  sank,  the  Southwest  rose.  When 
men  recalled  the  war  with  shame,  it  was  be 
cause  of  Hartford;  when  they  spoke  of  it 
with  pride,  as  in  time  they  came  to  do,  it 
was  because  they  saw,  on  the  parapet  of  New 
Orleans,  looking  out  over  heaps  of  British 
dead,  the  thin,  tall  figure  of  the  horseman  in 
Lafayette  Square.  True,  the  victory  might 
seem  worthless,  for  the  peace  was  made  be 
fore  the  battle  was  fought;  but  the  victor 
had  won  for  his  countrymen  something  dearer 
than  anything  set  forth  in  treaties.  He  had 
won  them  back  their  good  opinion  of  them 
selves.  In  the  prosperous  years  that  were 
to  follow,  Andrew  Jackson,  the  man  of  the 
Southwest,  was  to  stand  as  no  other  man 
could  for  the  American's  faith  in  his  country 
against  the  world. 

But  the  victorious  general  was  still  the 
same  Andrew  Jackson ;  he  did  not  leave 
New  Orleans  without  exhibiting  some  of  the 


NEW  ORLEANS  83 

characteristics  that  were  so  well  known  in 
Tennessee.  Relaxing  none  of  his  vigilance, 
he  kept  the  city  under  martial  law  after  the 
British  had  sailed,  and  even  after  the  British 
admiral  had  sent  him  word  of  the  peace. 
Many  New  Orleans  people  protested,  and 
certain  of  them  claimed  exemption  from  the 
work  of  defense  on  the  ground  that  they 
were  citizens  of  France.  All  such  he  ordered 
out  of  the  city.  Mr.  Louaillier,  a  leading 
citizen,  published  a  protest,  and  Jackson 
promptly  arrested  him.  Judge  Hall,  of  the 
United  States  District  Court,  issued  a  writ 
of  habeas  corpus  for  the  prisoner,  and  Jack 
son  as  promptly  arrested  the  judge  him 
self,  and  did  not  release  him  until,  early  in 
March,  official  notice  of  the  peace  was  re 
ceived.  The  judge  fined  the  general  a  thou 
sand  dollars  for  contempt  of  court,  and 
nearly  thirty  years  afterwards  the  American 
Congress  voted  money  enough  to  repay  the 
sum  with  interest.  Between  the  battle  and 
the  news  of  peace,  Jackson  also  signed  the 
order  for  the  execution  of  six  militiamen 
whom  a  court-martial  had  found  guilty  of 


84  ANDREW  JACKSON 

mutiny  and  desertion.  There  were  circum 
stances  which  seemed  to  recommend  these 
men  to  mercy,  and  in  after  years  the  order 
was  cited  along  with  other  things  to  prove 
that  Jackson  was  a  cruel  and  arbitrary  com 
mander. 

However,  the  War  Department  gave  him 
only  the  mildest  of  reproofs  for  his  treatment 
of  the  civil  authorities  at  New  Orleans,  and 
when  he  returned  to  Tennessee  it  was  to  a 
welcome  even  more  heartfelt  and  stirring 
than  the  one  he  got  on  his  return  from  the 
Creek  war.  In  the  autumn  he  was  called 
to  Washington  to  consult  with  his  superiors 
about  putting  the  army  on  a  peace  footing, 
and  on  the  journey  and  at  the  capital  he  was 
universally  received  as  the  hero  of  the  war. 
The  army  was  reduced  to  ten  thousand  men, 
and  distributed  into  a  northern  and  a  south 
ern  department.  The  command  of  the  north 
ern  department  was  given  to  General  Jacob 
Brown ;  Jackson  got  the  southern  depart 
ment. 

It  was  about  this  time  that  Governor 
Alston,  of  South  Carolina,  got  a  letter  from 


NEW  ORLEANS  85 

his  father-in-law,  Aaron  Burr,  of  New  York, 
concerning  the  approaching  presidential  elec 
tion.  Burr  thought  Monroe,  the  leading 
candidate  and  the  man  preferred  by  Presi 
dent  Madison,  too  weak  a  man  for  the  great 
office.  He  wanted  a  man  of  firmness  and  de 
cision,  and  he  added,  "  that  man  is  Andrew 
Jackson."  But  as  yet  Jackson  himself  had 
no  such  ambition.  As  late  as  1821,  in  fact, 
he  said,  in  reply  to  a  suggestion  that  he 
might  be  President :  "  No,  sir ;  I  know  what 
I  am  fit  for.  I  can  command  a  body  of  men 
in  a  rough  way ;  but  I  am  not  fit  to  be 
President."  He  cordially  supported  Monroe 
in  1816,  and  after  his  election  wrote  to  him 
and  made  a  few  suggestions  about  his  ad 
ministration.  One  of  these  suggestions  was 
to  appoint  a  Federalist,  Colonel  William 
Drayton,  Secretary  of  War.  Jackson  de 
clared  that,  had  he  been  in  command  in  New 
England,  he  would  have  hanged  the  leaders 
of  the  Hartford  Convention ;  but  he  was  in 
favor  of  recognizing  the  loyalty  of  such  Fed 
eralists  as  had  served  the  country  faithfully 
during  the  war.  That  letter  to  Monroe  was 


86  ANDREW  JACKSON 

"copied"  for  the  general  by  his  neighbor 
and  friend,  William  B.  Lewis,  as  were  hun 
dreds  of  others.  The  general  himself  was  a 
poor  writer,  and  Major  Lewis  was  a  skilful 
man  with  a  pen.  He  was  also  an  exceedingly 
clever  politician,  and  he  showed  his  clever 
ness  by  keeping  a  second  copy  of  the  letter 
to  Monroe  for  future  use.  In  the  course  of 
the  correspondence,  Monroe  let  Jackson  know 
that  he  himself  might  be  Secretary  of  War 
if  he  chose ;  but  Jackson  was  content  with 
his  command. 


V 

THE   SEMINOLES    AND    THE   POLITICIANS 

FOR  three  years  General  Jackson  was 
mainly  occupied  with  the  duties  of  a  military 
officer  in  time  of  peace  ;  but  he  was  also 
employed  to  make  treaties  with  several  In 
dian  tribes,  and  won  another  royal  welcome 
home  from  the  Tennesseans  by  throwing 
open  to  settlement  large  areas  of  Indian 
lands.  Even  in  peace,  however,  he  found 
an  opportunity  to  display  his  readiness  to 
do  the  right  thing  in  a  way  to  make  trou 
ble.  Being  several  times  annoyed  by  orders 
issued  direct  from  the  War  Department  to 
his  inferiors,  and  seeing  clearly  that  this 
was  not  the  proper  procedure,  he  issued  a 
general  order  forbidding  his  subordinates  to 
obey  any  commands  which  did  not  reach 
them  through  him.  Calhotm,  who  became 
Secretary  of  War  soon  afterwards,  conceded 


88  ANDREW  JACKSON 

the  justice  of  the  general's  position,  but  Jack 
son's  course  in  the  matter  was  certainly  rather 
high-handed.  General  Winfield  Scott  criti 
cised  it  in  private  conversation,  and  a  mis 
chief-maker  brought  his  words  to  Jackson's 
attention.  The  result  was  some  fiery  and 
abusive  letters  to  Scott,  and  a  challenge  to 
a  duel,  which  Scott,  on  religious  grounds, 
very  properly  declined.  Jackson  also  car 
ried  on  an  angry  correspondence  with  Gen 
eral  Adair,  of  Kentucky,  who  defended  the 
Kentucky  troops  from  the  charge  of  cow 
ardice  at  New  Orleans. 

It  was  late  in  the  year  1817  before  Gen 
eral  Jackson  was  again  called  to  active  ser 
vice  in  the  field.  Once  more  the  call  was 
from  the  southward,  and  his  old  enemies,  the 
Red  Sticks,  the  English,  and  the  Spaniards, 
were  all  in  some  measure  responsible  for  it. 
A  number  of  Red  Sticks  had  taken  refuge 
with  their  kinsmen,  the  Seminoles,  in  Florida. 
Colonel  Nichols  and  a  small  force  of  British 
had  also  remained  in  Florida  some  time  after 
the  war  ended,  and  had  done  things  of  a 
nature  to  stir  up  the  Indians  there  against 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS       89 

the  Americans  across  the  border.  Negro 
slaves,  escaping  from  American  masters,  had 
fled  to  the  Spanish  province  in  considerable 
numbers,  and  a  bod}7  of  them  got  possession 
of  a  fort  on  the  Apalachicola  River  which 
had  been  abandoned  by  the  British.  To 
add  to  the  disorder  of  the  province,  it  was 
frequented  by  adventurers,  some  of  them 
claiming  to  be  there  in  order  to  lead  a  revo 
lution  against  Spain,  some  of  them  probably 
mere  freebooters.  The  Spanish  authorities 
at  Pensacola  were  too  weak  to  control  such 
a  population,  and  Americans  near  the  border 
were  anxious  to  have  their  government  inter 
fere.  The  negro  fort  was  a  centre  of  law 
lessness,  and  some  American  troops  marched 
down  the  river,  bombarded  it,  and  by  a  lucky 
shot  blew  up  its  magazine  and  killed  nearly 
three  hundred  negroes.  Troubles  arose 
with  the  Indians  also,  and  Fowltown,  an 
Indian  village,  was  taken  and  burned.  A 
considerable  body  of  Indians  took  to  the 
war-path,  and  Jackson  was  ordered  to  the 
scene. 

Impatient  as  ever  with  the  Spaniards,  he  . 


90  ANDREW  JACKSON 

wrote  to  President  Monroe :  "  Let  it  be  sig 
nified  to  me  through  any  channel  (say  Mr. 
J.  Ehea)  that  the  possession  of  Florida 
would  be  desirable  to  the  United  States, 
and  in  sixty  days  it  will  be  accomplished." 
Monroe  was  ill  at  the  time,  and  for  some 
reason  did  not  attend  to  the  general's  letter 
for  a  year.  The  President  was  trying  to  get 
Florida  peaceably,  by  purchase,  and  not  by 
conquest.  Jackson,  however,  got  the  idea 
that  his  suggestion  was  approved,  and  acted 
accordingly. 

Eaising  troops  in  Tennessee  on  his  own 
authority,  he  marched  rapidly  to  the  scene 
of  trouble,  crossed  the  border  into  Florida, 
and  in  a  few  weeks  crushed  the  Seminoles. 
Of  fighting,  in  fact,  there  was  very  little  ; 
what  there  was  fell  almost  entirely  to  the 
friendly  Indians,  and  not  a  single  American 
soldier  was  killed.  But  Jackson's  actions 
in  the  campaign  brought  on  the  bitterest 
controversies  of  his  career.  By  his  order 
four  men  were  put  to  death,  and  he  cap 
tured  Pensacola  again,  claiming  that  some 
Indians  had  taken  refuge  there.  Two  of 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS     91 

the  four  men  were  Creek  Red  Sticks.  The 
other  two  were  white  men  and  British  sub 
jects.  One  was  Alexander  Arbuthnot,  an 
old  man  of  seventy,  a  trader  among  the  In 
dians,  and,  so  far  as  is  known,  a  man  of  good 
character.  He  was  taken  prisoner,  how 
ever,  and  it  is  supposed  a  letter  he  wrote  to 
his  son,  telling  him  to  take  their  merchandise 
to  a  place  of  safety,  warned  some  Indians  of 
Jackson's  approach.  The  other  British  sub 
ject  was  an  Englishman  named  Robert  Am-  y 
brister,  who  had  been  a  lieutenant  in  the 
British  army.  He  was  nephew  to  the  gov 
ernor  of  New  Providence,  one  of  the  British 
AVest  Indies,  and  seems  to  have  been  in 
Florida  rather  in  search  of  adventure  than 
for  any  clearly  ascertainable  purpose.  A 
court-martial  found  Arbuthnot  guilty  of  in 
citing  the  Creek  Indians  to  rise  against  the 
United  States,  and  of  aiding  the  enemy. 
Ambrister  was  found  guilty  of  levying  war 
against  the  United  States.  He  was  first 
sentenced  to  be  shot ;  then,  on  reconsidera 
tion,  the  court  changed  the  sentence  to  fifty 
stripes  and  hard  labor  for  a  year.  Jackson 


92  ANDREW  JACKSON 

firmly  believed  that  both  were  British  emissa 
ries,  sent  to  Florida  to  stir  up  the  Indians. 
He  disapproved  the  change  of  Ambrister's 
sentence,  and  ordered  him  to  be  shot  and 
Arbuthnot  to  be  hanged. 

Such  fierce  and  energetic  measures,  whe 
ther  justifiable  or  not,  put  an  end  to  the 
disorder  on  the  border,  and  Jackson  was 
again  free  to  return  home  a  victor.  The 
country  was  disposed  to  approve  what  he 
had  done,  but  the  President  and  Cabinet 
saw  that  grave  international  questions  would 
be  raised ;  for  Jackson  had  invaded  the  soil 
of  a  country  at  peace  with  the  United  States, 
taken  possession  of  its  forts,  and  put  to 
death  citizens  of  another  country  also  at 
peace  with  the  United  States.  John  C. 
Calhoun,  of  South  Carolina,  the  Secretary  of 
War,  was  in  favor  of  censuring  the  general 
for  his  conduct ;  but  John  Quincy  Adams, 
of  Massachusetts,  the  Secretary  of  State, 
thought  his  acts  necessary  under  the  circum 
stances,  and  declared  himself  ready  to  de 
fend  them.  In  the  end  he  did  defend  them 
so  well  that  neither  Spain  nor  Great  Britain 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS      93 

made  serious  trouble  over  them.  The  Presi 
dent  and  his  Cabinet  followed  Adams's  ad 
vice  instead  of  Calhoun's,  and  Calhoun  him 
self,  as  Jackson's  superior,  wrote  to  him 
about  the  campaign  in  a  friendly  way. 
Jackson  naturally  thought  that  Calhoun  had 
been  his  friend  in  the  Cabinet,  and  had  no 
reason  to  suspect  that  it  was  Adams  who 
defended,  and  Calhoun  who  wished  to  cen 
sure  him.  He  did  not  learn  the  truth  for 
many  years.  Had  he  known  it  sooner,  there 
is  no  telling  how  different  the  political  his 
tory  of  the  next  twenty  years  might  have 
been. 

For  henceforth  Jackson  was  to  be  a  great 
figure  not  in  warfare  but  in  politics.  His 
military  career  was  practically  ended.  He 
kept  his  commission  until  July,  1821,  but 
from  this  time  he  fought  no  more  battles. 
He  had  not,  as  a  soldier,  given  such  evidence 
of  military  genius  as  to  set  his  name  along 
side  those  of  the  great  captains  of  history, 
but  he  had  shown  himself  a  strong  and  suc 
cessful  leader  of  men  ;  in  his  masterful,  often 
irregular  and  violent  way,  he  had  done  his 


9i  ANDREW  JACKSON 

country  good  service.  Were  his  place  in 
history  merely  a  soldier's,  it  would  be  a  safe 
one,  though  not  the  highest.  But  his  actions 
in  the  field  soon  gave  him  the  leading  part 
on  a  different  stage.  One  day  in  January, 
1819,  he  rode  up  to  the  house  of  his  neigh 
bor,  Major  Lewis,  who  had  just  bought  a 
new  overcoat,  and  asked  him  to  get  himself 
another ;  the  general  wanted  the  one  already 
made  to  wear  on  a  long  journey.  "  Major," 
he  said,  "  there  is  a  combination  in  Wash 
ington  to  ruin  me.  I  start  to  Washington 
to-morrow." 

The  chief  of  those  who,  as  Jackson  firmly 
believed,  were  combined  to  ruin  him,  was 
the  man  who  could  with  best  reason  be  com 
pared  to  the  hero  of  New  Orleans  for  the 
place  he  had  in  the  affections  of  the  West 
ern  people  and  as  the  representative  of  the 
new  American  spirit,  born  of  the  second 
war  with  Great  Britain.  If  Jackson  was 
the  hero  of  the  war,  Henry  Clay  was  its 
orator ;  if  it  was  Jackson  who  sent  from  one 
quarter  the  news  of  a  glorious  victory,  it 
was  Clay  who,  with  Adams  and  Gallatin, 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS     95 

had  secured  the  peace.  Leaving  Ghent, 
Clay  was  lingering  in  Paris  when  he  heard 
the  news  of  New  Orleans.  "  Now,"  he  ex 
claimed,  "  I  can  go  to  England  without  mor 
tification."  But  the  great  orator  was  not 
in  sympathy  with  Monroe's  administration. 
His  enemies  declared  he  was  in  opposition 
because  he  was  not  asked  to  be  Secretary  of 
State,  and  because  he  feared  that  Adams, 
who  had  the  place,  would  become  President 
four  years  later.  However  that  may  have 
been,  it  was  Clay  who  led  the  attack  on 
the  administration  about  the  campaign  in 
Florida.  Protesting  his  deep  respect  for 
"  the  illustrious  military  chieftain "  who 
commanded  there,  he  yet  condemned  the 
hanging  of  the  two  Red  Sticks,  the  execu 
tion  of  Arbuthnot  and  Ambrister,  the  tak 
ing  of  Pensacola. 

From  the  moment  Jackson  read  that 
speech  he  was  Clay's  enemy,  and  a  warfare 
began  that  lasted  twenty-five  years.  Every 
man,  in  fact,  who  in  the  course  of  the  long 
debate  that  followed  condemned  the  acts  of 
General  Jackson  in  Florida  was  written 


96  ANDREW  JACKSON 

down  an  enemy  on  the  tablets  of  his  mem 
ory.  He  remained  in  Washington  until 
the  House  had  voted  down  every  resolution 
unfavorable  to  his  course,  and  he  had  thus 
won  his  first  victory  over  Clay.  Then  he  set 
forth  on  a  northern  journey  which  showed 
him  the  immense  popularity  he  had  in 
places  like  New  York,  Philadelphia,  and 
Baltimore,  and  gave  him  an  opportunity  to 
increase  it  by  the  fine  appearance  he  made 
in  public.  He  returned  to  find  that  a  Sen 
ate  committee  had  reported  unfavorably  on 
his  conduct,  but  the  Senate  never  acted  on 
the  report,  and  on  his  journey  homeward 
the  people  gave  him  every  reason  to  believe 
that  the  great  majority  of  his  countrymen 
approved  the  votes  of  the  lower  house.  As 
if  to  complete  his  triumph,  he  was  soon 
called  once  more  to  Florida  ;  and  this  time 
he  entered  Pensacola,  not  as  a  soldier  invad 
ing  a  foreign  province,  but  as  the  chief 
magistrate  of  an  American  territory.  In 
February,  1821,  after  so  many  years  of  ne 
gotiation,  Florida  was  bought  by  the  United 
States.  President  Monroe  appointed  Jack- 
V, 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS      97 

son  governor  and  commissioner  to  receive 
the  province,  and  he,  bidding  farewell  to 
the  army,  entered  again  upon  the  duties  of 
a  civil  office. 

Even  in  his  farewell  to  his  troops,  Jack 
son  took  occasion  to  attack  a  policy  recently 
favored  by  his  superior,  General  Jacob 
Brown,  and  any  one  who  knew  Jackson 
might  have  guessed  that  the  holding  of  a 
civil  office  would  never  keep  him  from  vio 
lent  courses,  particularly  in  Pensacola.  He 
held  the  office  only  a  few  months,  for  he 
was  in  wretched  health.  His  wife,  who  was 
with  him,  tells  in  one  of  her  letters  how 
pale  and  solemn  he  was  when  he  rode  into 
Pensacola  for  the  third  time,  and  how  ill  he 
was  while  he  was  there.  He  resigned  in 
October,  but  before  he  resigned  he  had 
made  another  cause  of  dispute  with  Spain. 
The  retiring  Spanish  governor,  Callava,  was 
accused  of  attempting  to  carry  away  papers 
which  were  necessary  to  establish  the  pro 
perty  rights  of  a  quadroon  family.  The 
correspondence  on  the  subject  led  to  a  series 
of  misunderstandings,  and  General  Jackson 


98  ANDREW  JACKSON 

was  soon  convinced  that  villainy  was  afoot. 
The  upshot  of  the  dispute  was  that  the 
American  governor  put  the  Spanish  gov 
ernor  in  jail ;  and  when  the  United  States 
judge  of  West  Florida,  a  curious  character 
named  Fromentin,  tried  to  mend  the  matter 
with  a  writ  of  habeas  corpus,  he  fared  little 
better  than  Judge  Hall  of  New  Orleans  had 
fared  before  him. 

Mr.  Parton's  laborious  investigation  of 
this  comical  affair  enables  him  to  show 
that  the  estate  over  which  the  trouble  arose 
was  of  no  value  whatever,  and  that  Jack 
son's  chivalrous  impulse  to  defend  a  fam 
ily  he  thought  wronged  led  him  into  a 
very  arbitrary  and  indefensible  action.  As 
usual,  his  motives  were  good,  but  his  tem 
per  was  not  improved  by  his  illness  or  by 
the  fact  that  Callava,  who  seems  to  have 
been  a  worthy  gentleman,  was  a  Spaniard, 
and  had  been  governor  of  Florida.  Jackson 
had  a  rooted  dislike  of  Spanish  governors, 
and  doubtless  congratulated  himself  and  the 
country  that  there  would  be  no  more  of 
them  in  Florida,  when,  for  the  last  time,  he 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS      99 

turned  northward  from  Pensacola  to  seek 
The  Hermitage  and  the  rest  which  his  dis 
eased  body  sorely  needed. 

The  Hermitage  was  by  this  time  a  good 
place  to  rest  in,  for  it  had  grown  to  be  a 
Southern  plantation  home,  quite  unlike  the 
bare  homes  which  sheltered  the  first  settlers 
of  that  neighborhood,  and  it  had  its  full 
share  of  the  charm  that  belonged  to  that 
old  Southern  life.  It  was  the  seat  of  an 
abundant  hospitality.  The  fame  of  its  mas 
ter  drew  thither  interesting  men  from  a  dis 
tance.  His  benevolence,  and  the  homely 
charity  of  his  wife,  made  it  a  resort  for 
many  of  the  neighborhood  whom  they  two 
had  befriended,  for  young  people  fond  of 
the  simple  amusements  of  those  days,  and 
for  ministers  of  the  Gospel,  whom  Mrs. 
Jackson,  an  extremely  pious  woman,  liked 
especially  to  have  about  her.  For  his  wife's 
sake,  the  general  built  a  tiny  church  on  the 
estate,  and  always  treated  with  profound 
respect  the  religion  which  he  himself  had 
not  professed,  but  which  he  honored  because 
Mrs.  Jackson  was  a  Christian.  Indeed, 


100  ANDREW  JACKSON 

there  is  nothing  in  the  man's  whole  life 
more  honorable  than  his  perfect  loyalty  to 
her.  She  was  a  simple,  uncultivated,  kind- 
hearted  frontier  woman,  no  longer  attrac 
tive  in  person,  and  a  great  contrast  to  the 
courtly  figure  by  her  side  when  she  and  the 
general  were  in  company.  It  is  certainly 
true  that  the  two  used  to  smoke  their  reed 
pipes  together  before  the  fire  after  dinner, 
and  that  custom,  to  one  ignorant  of  Ameri 
can  life  in  the  Southwest,  would  stamp  them 
as  persons  of  the  lowest  manners.  Yet  it  is 
also  true  that  "  Aunt  Rachel,"  as  Mrs.  Jack 
son  was  commonly  called  by  younger  people 
of  the  neighborhood,  was  loved  and  honored 
by  all  who  knew  her.  The  general  had  not 
merely  fine  manners,  but  that  which  is  finer 
far  than  the  finest  manners  :  he  had  kindness 
for  his  slaves,  hospitality  for  strangers,  gen 
tleness  with  women  and  children.  Lafay 
ette  was  at  The  Hermitage  in  1825,  and  his 
noble  nature  was  drawn  to  Jackson  in  a 
way  quite  impossible  to  understand  if  he 
was  nothing  more  than  the  vindictive  duel 
ist,  the  headstrong  brawler,  the  crusher  out 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS     101 

of  Indians,  the  hater  of  Britons  and  Span 
iards,  which  we  know  that  he  was.  Lafay 
ette  found  at  The  Hermitage  the  pistols 
which  he  himself  had  given  to  Washington 
and  which,  with  many  swords  and  other 
tokens  of  the  public  esteem,  had  come  to  the 
hero  of  New  Orleans.  The  friend  of  Wash 
ington  declared  that  the  pistols  had  come 
to  worthy  hands,  notwithstanding  that  his 
host  was  equally  ready  to  display  another 
weapon  with  the  remark,  "  That  is  the  pistol 
with  which  I  killed  Mr.  Dickinson." 

It  seems  clear  that  Jackson  honestly  meant 
to  spend  the  rest  of  his  days  at  the  Hermit 
age.  His  friend  Eaton,  a  Senator  from 
Tennessee,  had  already  written  his  life  down 
to  New  Orleans,  and  probably  he  would 
have  been  content,  so  far  as  his  public 
career  was  concerned,  to  let  finis  follow  the 
name  of  his  greatest  victory.  But  Eaton 
himself,  and  Major  Lewis,  and  other  friends, 
and  the  vast  public  which  his  deeds  had 
stirred,  would  not  let  him  alone.  Within  a 
year  of  his  retirement,  a  group  of  his  friends 
were  working  shrewdly  to  make  him  Presi- 


102  ANDREW  JACKSON 

dent  of  the  United  States.  In  1823,  John 
Williams,  who  was  an  enemy  to  Jackson, 
came  before  the  Tennessee  legislature  for  re 
election  to  the  United  States  Senate.  Jack 
son's  friends  were  determined  to  beat  him, 
and  found  they  could  do  it  in  only  one  way. 
They  elected  Jackson  himself.  In  that,  as 
in  all  the  clever  political  work  that  was  done 
for  him,  Major  Lewis  was  the  leading  man. 
Before  the  time  came  to  choose  a  successor 
to  President  Monroe  in  1824,  Tennessee 
had  declared  for  her  foremost  citizen,  and 
Pennsylvania,  to  the  surprise  of  the  country, 
soon  followed  the  lead.  The  sceptre  was 
about  to  pass  from  the  Virginian  line,  and 
from  all  the  great  sections  of  the  Union 
distinguished  statesmen  stepped  forward  to 
grasp  it.  From  Georgia  came  William  H. 
Crawford,  a  practiced  politician  ;  from  South 
Carolina,  John  C.  Calhoun,  the  subtlest  of 
reasoners  ;  from  Kentucky,  Henry  Clay,  the 
orator;  from  Massachusetts,  John  Quincy 
Adams,  the  best  drained  of  public  servants. 
Only  Tennessee  offered  a  soldier. 

It  was  twenty-six  years  from  the  end  of 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS     103 

Jackson's  first  service  in  Congress  to  his 
second  appearance  in  the  Senate.  Again 
he  showed  himself  unfit  to  shine  as  a  legis 
lator,  but  in  spite  of  that  he  was  now  clearly 
the  most  marked  figure  in  the  upper  house. 
None  of  his  rivals  were  Senators.  Clay  was 
the  Speaker  of  the  House  ;  Adams,  Craw 
ford,  and  Calhoun  were  in  the  Cabinet. 
Jackson  probably  did  not  occupy  more  than 
ten  minutes  of  the  Senate's  time  during  the 
whole  session,  but  his  fame  and  his  can 
didacy  made  his  votes  on  the  tariff  and 
internal  improvements  important  data  to 
politicians.  The  country  was  already  en 
tered  upon  the  second  period  of  its  history, 
in  which  there  was  to  be  no  French  party 
and  no  English  party;  in  which  a  voter 
should  choose  his  party  on  account  of  its 
position  on  such  questions  as  the  tariff,  in 
ternal  improvements,  and  the  bank,  or  on 
account  of  the  general  view  of  the  Constitu 
tion  which  it  favored.  But  as  yet  no  clear 
division  into  such  parties  had  come  about. 
The  old  Federalist  party  was  no  longer  in 
the  field,  and  no  other  had  arisen  to  take  its 


104  ANDREW  JACKSON 

place.  It  was  a  time  of  personal  politics. 
The  first  question  was,  Who  is  to  succeed 
Monroe  ?  and  the  next  question,  Who  is  to 
succeed  the  successor  of  Monroe  ? 

Jackson  found  some  firm  friends  awaiting 
him  in  Washington,  and  he  soon  added  to 
their  number  by  becoming  reconciled  to 
some  old  enemies.  Among  the  old  friends 
was  Livingston,  now  Congressman  from  Lou 
isiana.  One  of  the  old  enemies  was  the  Sen 
ator  from  Missouri,  whose  chair  was  next 
his  own  ;  for  the  Senator  from  Missouri,  a 
rising  man  in  Washington,  was  Thomas  H. 
Benton.  According  to  Ben  ton's  account, 
Jackson  made  the  first  advance,  and  they 
were  soon  on  friendly  terms,  though  Benton 
continued  to  support  Clay,  whose  niece  he 
had  married.  General  Winfield  Scott  made 
an  overture,  and  Jackson  cordially  responded. 
Even  with  Henry  Clay  he  was  induced  by 
mutual  friends  to  stand  on  a  footing  of 
courteous  friendliness,  though  there  never 
was  any  genuine  friendship  between  them. 

Against  Crawford,  the  Georgian  candidate, 
and  at  first  the  leading  candidate  of  all,  he 


SEHItfOLES  AND  POLITICIANS     105 

had  a  grudge  that  dated  from  1815.  Craw 
ford  was  Secretary  of  War  at  that  time,  and, 
contrary  to  Jackson's  advice,  had  restored 
to  the  Cherokees  certain  lands  which  Jack 
son  had  got  from  the  Creeks  by  the  treaty 
of  Fort  Jackson,  but  which  the  Cherokees 
claimed.  When  Crawford  offered  himself 
against  Monroe  in  1816,  Jackson  was  ar 
dently  for  the  Virginian  ;  and  now,  when  it 
was  apparent  that  the  caucus  of  Republican 
Senators  and  Representatives  would  probably 
nominate  Crawford,  Jackson's  friends  joined 
the  friends  of  other  candidates  in  opposing 
the  caucus  altogether,  so  that  in  the  end  only 
sixty-six  persons  attended  it,  and  its  action 
was  deprived  of  the  weight  it  had  formerly 
had  in  presidential  contests.  Before  the 
election,  Crawford  was  stricken  with  paraly 
sis,  and  this  greatly  weakened  his  chances. 

Both  Calhoun  and  Adams  were  on  friendly 
terms  with  Jackson.  Jackson  still  supposed 
that  Calhouu  had  defended  the  Florida  cam 
paign  in  the  Cabinet.  His  good  feeling 
toward  the  South  Carolinian  was  doubtless 
strengthened  when  Calhoun,  who  had  relied 


106  ANDREW  JACKSON 

on  the  support  of  Pennsylvania,  gracefully 
yielded  to  Jackson's  superior  popularity  in 
that  quarter,  and  withdrew  from  the  contest. 
It  was  then  generally  agreed  that  he  should 
be  Vice-President,  and  probably  General 
Jackson,  like  many  others,  was  willing  that 
he  should  restore  the  old  order  of  things 
according  to  which  the  Vice-  President,  in 
stead  of  the  Secretary  of  State,  stood  in  line 
of  succession  to  the  presidency. 

Adams  was  Secretary  of  State,  and  as  such 
he  had  rendered  Jackson  important  services 
by  defending  his  actions  in  Florida.  Adams, 
in  diplomacy,  believed  in  standing  up  for  his 
own  country  quite  as  resolutely  as  the  fron 
tier  general  did  in  war.  Nor  were  they  far 
apart  on  the  tariff  and  internal  improve 
ments,  the  domestic  questions  of  the  day. 
Adams's  diary  for  this  period  shows  a  good 
feeling  for  Jackson.  In  honor  of  the  gen 
eral,  Mrs.  Adams  gave  a  great  ball  January 
8,  1824,  the  anniversary  of  New  Orleans. 

The  election  turned,  as  so  many  others 
have  turned,  on  the  vote  of  New  York,  which 
Martin  Van  Buren,  an  astute  politician,  was 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS     107 

trying  to  carry  for  Crawford.  He  did  not 
succeed,  and  there  was  no  choice  by  the  peo 
ple.  Jackson  led  with  ninety-nine  votes  in 
the  electoral  college  ;  Adams  had  eighty- 
four,  Crawford  forty-one,  Clay  thirty-seven. 
In  some  States  the  electors  were  still  chosen 
by  the  legislature.  Outside  of  those  States 
Jackson  had  fifty  thousand  more  votes  than 
Adams,  and  Adams's  vote  was  nearly  equal 
to  Crawford's  and  Clay's  combined.  For 
Yice-President,  Calhoun  had  a  large  ma 
jority. 

Under  the  Constitution,  the  House  of 
Representatives  had  now  to  choose  a  Presi 
dent  from  the  three  leading  candidates. 
Clay  was  Speaker,  and  had  great  influence 
over  the  House,  but  his  own  name  had  to  be 
dropped.  Beaten  himself,  he  had  the  power 
to  make  any  one  of  his  three  rivals  President 
of  the  United  States. 

It  was  a  trying  situation  for  him  and  for 
the  three  citizens  whose  fate  he  seemed  to 
hold  in  his  hands.  Crawford  was  so  ill 
that  Clay  could  not  seriously  consider  him. 
Adams  had  never  liked  Clay,  though  they 


108  ANDREW  JACKSON 

generally  agreed  about  public  questions,  and 
the  ardent  Kentuckian  could  never  have 
found  the  cold  manners  of  the  New  England 
statesman  attractive.  But  from  the  first  he 
preferred  Adams  to  Jackson,  thinking  a 
mere  "  military  chieftain  "  unfit  for  the  of 
fice.  On  the  9th  of  February,  Adams  was 
elected.  That  evening  he  and  Jackson  met 
at  a  presidential  reception.  Of  the  two,  the 
defeated  Westerner  bore  himself  far  more 
graciously  than  the  successful  candidate  from 
New  England. 

Up  to  this  time,  no  unseemly  conduct 
could  be  charged  against  any  one  of  the  four 
rivals.  But  the  human  nature  of  these  men 
could  not  bear  to  the  end  the  strain  of  such 
a  rivalry.  For  many  years  the  jealousy  and 
hatred  and  suspicion  it  gave  birth  to  were 
to  blacken  American  politics.  Jackson  was 
guilty  of  a  grave  injustice  to  Clay  and 
Adams ;  and  they,  by  a  political  blunder,  de 
livered  themselves  into  his  hands.  Jackson 
and  his  friends  charged  them  with  u  bargain 
and  corruption."  Adams,  by  appointing  Clay 
Secretary  of  State,  and  Clay,  by  accepting 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS     109 

the  office,  gave  their  enemies  the  only  evi 
dence  they  ever  had  to  offer  of  the  truth  of 
the  charge.  Every  other  semblance  of  a 
proof  was  shown  to  be  worthless,  and  the 
characters  of  the  two  men  have  convinced 
all  candid  historians  that  the  charge  was 
false.  But  there  was  no  way  to  prove  that 
the  charge  was  false.  Jackson  believed  it, 
and  from  this  time  he  made  war  on  Clay 
and  Adams.  *  He  believed  he  had  a  wrong  to 
right,  a  combination  of  scoundrelly  enemies 
to  overthrow,  a  corrupted  government  to 
purify  and  save.  The  election  had  shown 
him  to  be  the  most  popular  of  all  the  candi 
dates,  and  his  friends,  of  whom  Benton  was 
now  the  foremost,  contended  that  the  House 
ought  to  have  chosen  him  in  obedience  to  the 
people's  will.  Until  he  should  be  elected, 
he  and  his  followers  seemed  to  feel  that  the 
people  were  hoodwinked  by  the  politicians. 

Hitherto,  since  his  second  entrance  into 
public  life,  he  had  borne  himself  as  became 
a  soldier  whose  battles  were  already  fought. 
Webster  had  written  of  him :  "  General 
Jackson's  manners  are  more  presidential 


110  ANDREW  JACKSON 

than  those  of  any  other  candidate.  He  is 
grave,  mild,  and  reserved."  But  now  he 
was  once  more  the  Jackson  of  the  tavern 
brawl,  of  the  Dickinson  duel.  Politics  had 
come  to  be  a  fight,  and  his  friends  had  no 
more  need  to  urge  him  on.  He  resigned  his 
place  in  the  Senate,  and  was  at  once,  for  the 
second  time,  nominated  for  President  by  the 
Tennessee  legislature.  With  untiring  in 
dustry  and  great  political  shrewdness,  Lewis, 
Eaton,  Benton,  Livingston,  and  others  of  his 
friends  set  to  work  to  get  him  elected.  The 
campaign  of  1824  was  no  sooner  ended  than 
the  campaign  of  1828  was  begun. 

It  was  an  important  campaign  because  it 
went  far  to  divide  the  old  Republican  party, 
to  which  all  the  candidates  of  1824  had  be 
longed,  into  the  two  parties  which  were  to 
battle  for  supremacy  throughout  the  next 
quarter  of  a  century.  The  division  was 
partly  a  matter  of  principles  and  policies, 
but  it  was  also  a  matter,  of  organization. 

As  to  principles  and  measures,  Adams 
was  disposed  to  revive  those  policies  which 
the  old  Federalist  party  had  adopted  in  the 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS     111 

days  of  its  power.  He  had  left  that  party 
in  1808,  not  because  he  had  given  up  its 
early  principles,  but  because  he  believed 
that  its  leaders,  particularly  in  New  Eng 
land,  in  their  bitter  opposition  to  Jefferson, 
had  gone  to  the  point  where  opposition  to 
the  party  in  power  passes  into  disloyalty 
to  the  country.  In  the  Republican  party 
he  always  acted  with  those  men  who,  like 
Henry  Clay,  favored  a  strong  government 
at  Washington  and  looked  with  distrust  on 
any  attempt  of  a  State  to  set  up  its  own 
powers  against  the  powers  of  the  United 
States.  As  President,  he  wished  the  gov 
ernment  to  take  vigorous  measures  for  de 
fense,  for  developing  the  country  by  internal 
improvements,  for  protecting  American  in 
dustries  by  heavy  duties  on  goods  imported 
.from  other  countries.  He  thought  that  the 
public  lands  should  be  sold  at  the  highest 
prices  they  would  bring,  and  the  money  used 
by  the  general  government  to  promote  the 
public  welfare.  He  had  no  doubt  as  to  the 
government's  power  to  maintain  a  national 
bank,  and  thought  that  was  the  very  best 
way  to  manage  the  finances. 


112  ANDREW  JACKSON 

Jackson  himself  was  not  a  free-trader, 
and  had  committed  himself  to  a  "  proper  " 
tariff  on  protection  lines ;  but  during  the 
campaign  he  was  made  to  appear  less  of 
a  tariff  man  than  Adams.  He  had  also 
voted  for  certain  national  roads  and  other 
internal  improvements,  but  he  had  not  com 
mitted  himself  sweepingly  to  that  policy. 
He  doubted  the  constitutionality  of  a  na 
tional  bank.  As  to  the  public  lands,  he 
favored  a  liberal  policy,  with  the  object  of 
developing  the  western  country  by  attract 
ing  settlers  rather  than  raising  money  to  be 
spent  by  the  government.  On  the  general 
question  of  the  powers  of  the  government  he 
stood  for  a  stricter  construction  of  the  Con 
stitution  and  greater  respect  for  the  rights 
of  the  States  than  Adams  believed  in.  So, 
notwithstanding  Jackson's  tariff  views,  the 
mass  of  the  people  held  him  a  better  repre 
sentative  of  Jeffersonian  Democracy  than  his 
rival. 

But  a  party  is  an  organization,  and  not 
merely  a  list  of  principles.  It  is,  as  some 
one  has  said,  a  crowd,  and  not  merely  a 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS     113 

creed.  Jackson's  managers  so  organized  his 
supporters  that  they  became  a  party  in  that 
sense  much  more  clearly  than  in  the  sense 
of  holding  the  same  views.  Committees 
were  formed  all  over  the  country  somewhat 
on  the  order  of  the  committees  of  corre 
spondence  of  Revolutionary  times.  News 
papers  were  set  up  to  attack  the  adminis 
tration  and  hold  the  Jackson  men  together. 
Everywhere  Jackson  was  represented  as  the 
candidate  of  the  plain  people  against  the 
politicians.  In  all  such  work  Major  Lewis 
was  active  and  shrewd,  and  before  the  end 
of  the  campaign,  from  another  quarter  of 
the  union,  Jackson  won  a  recruit  who  was 
already  a  past  master  in  all  the  lore  of  party 
politics.  Martin  Van  Buren  was  a  pupil 
in  the  political  school  of  Aaron  Burr,  and 
was  recognized  as  the  cleverest  politician  of 
a  State  in  which  the  sort  of  politics  that 
is  concerned  with  securing  elections  rather 
than  fighting  for  principles  had  grown  into 
a  science  and  an  art.  New  York  was  then 
thought  a  doubtful  State,  and  the  support 
of  Van  Buren  was  of  the  utmost  value. 


114  ANDREW  JACKSON 

It  is  probable  that  so  far  as  Adams  and 
Jackson  differed  on  questions  of  principle 
and  policy,  a  majority  of  the  people  were 
with  Jackson.  But  it  is  also  clear  that  the 
campaign  was  fought  out  as  a  sort  of  per 
sonal  contest  between  the  Southwestern  sol 
dier  and  the  two  statesmen  whom  he  accused 
of  bargain  and  corruption.  It  was  a  cam 
paign  of  bitter  personal  abuse  on  both  sides. 
Adams,  perhaps  the  most  rigidly  conscien 
tious  statesman  since  Washington,  was  ac 
cused  of  dishonesty,  of  extravagance,  of 
riches,  of  debt,  of  betraying  his  old  friends, 
the  Federalists,  of  trying  to  bring  Federalists 
back  into  power.  Against  Jackson  his  ene 
mies  brought  up  his  many  fights  and  duels, 
his  treatment  of  Judge  Hall  and  Judge  Fro- 
mentin,  the  execution  of  Woods  and  the  six 
militiamen,  of  the  two  Indians,  of  Arbuthnot 
and  Ambrister.  Handbills  were  distributed, 
each  decorated  with  a  coffin  bearing  the 
name  of  one  of  his  victims.  His  private  life 
was  attacked.  The  scandal  of  his  marriage 
was  blazoned  in  newspapers  and  pamphlets. 
Even  the  unknown  grave  of  his  mother  was 
not  spared. 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS     115 

So  it  became  largely  a  question  of  the 
two  men.  and  which  the  people  liked  best. 
Adams,  coldly  virtuous,  woidd  not  turn  his 
finger  to  make  himself  better  liked ;  even  if 
he  had  attempted  the  arts  of  popularity,  he 
was,  of  all  the  eminent  men  of  our  history, 
the  least  endowed  with  charm  of  manner, 
speech,  and  bearing.  He  sternly  refused  to 
appoint  any  man  to  office  for  supporting 
him,  or  to  turn  any  man  out  of  office  for 
opposing  him.  He  could  not  be  winning  or 
gracious  on  public  occasions.  Ezekiel,  the 
shrewd  old  brother  of  Daniel  Webster,  wrote 
to  him  after  the  election  that  even  in  New 
England  men  supported  Adams  "  from  a 
cold  sense  of  duty,  and  not  from  any  liking 
of  the  man."  It  took  a  New  England  con 
science  to  hold  a  follower  in  line  for  the  New 
England  candidate.  The  man  of  the  South 
west  won  many  a  vote  where  the  voter's  con 
science  did  but  half  consent.  Wherever  he 
went,  he  made  bitter  enemies  or  devoted 
friends,  rather  than  cold  critics  and  luke 
warm  admirers.  Adams  was  an  honest 
man,  but  nobody  had  ever  called  him  "  Old 


116  ANDREW  JACKSON 

Hickory."  He  was  an  ardent  patriot,  and 
could  point  to  many  wise  state  papers  he 
had  written,  to  a  report  on  weights  and 
measures  which  had  cost  him  four  years  of 
patient  labor ;  but  he  could  not,  like  his 
rival,  journey  down  the  Mississippi  and  cele 
brate  the  anniversary  of  a  great  victory  in 
the  city  he  had  saved.  His  followers  might 
ably  defend  his  course  on  public  questions, 
but  what  was  it  all  worth  if  the  people  kept 
on  shouting,  "  Hurrah  for  Jackson  "  ? 

Of  all  the  sections  of  the  country  only 
New  England  gave  Adams  a  solid  support. 
Jackson  swept  the  West  and  South  and  car 
ried  the  great  States  of  Pennsylvania  and 
New  York.  In  Tennessee,  nineteen  men  out 
of  twenty  voted  for  him.  There  is  a  story 
of  a  traveller  who  reached  a  Tennessee  town 
the  next  day  and  found  the  whole  male  popu 
lation  pursuing  with  tar  and  feathers  two 
reckless  citizens  who  had  voted  against  "  the 
general."  In  the  electoral  college  he  had 
one  hundred  and  seventy-eight  votes  to  Ad 
ams's  eighty-three.  Calhoun  was  again 
chosen  Vice-President. 


SEMINOLES  AND  POLITICIANS     117 

The  poor  boy  had  won  his  way  to  the 
White  House,  but  it  was  a  worn  old  man, 
bowed  down  with  a  heavy  sorrow,  who  jour 
neyed  across  the  mountains  to  take  the  great 
prize.  The  cruel  campaign  scandal  about 
his  marriage  had  aggravated  a  heart  trouble 
from  which  his  wife  had  long  suffered.  She 
died  in  December,  and  his  grief  was  appal 
ling  to  those  who  gathered  at  The  Hermitage 
to  do  honor  to  "  Aunt  Kachel."  It  was  not 
in  Jackson's  nature,  as  indeed  it  would  not 
have  been  in  the  nature  of  many  men,  to 
forget,  in  his  grief,  the  enemies  who  had 
helped  to  cause  it.  His  old  age,  like  his 
youth,  was  to  be  cursed  with  hatred  and  the 
thought  of  revenge. 


VI 

THE   WHITE   HOUSE 

MARCH  4, 1829,  Andrew  Jackson  became 
President  of  the  United  States.  A  great 
crowd  of  strange-looking  men  went  to  see 
him  inaugurated.  "They  really  seem  to 
think,"  wrote  Webster,  "  that  the  country 
has  been  rescued  from  some  great  danger." 
Whoever  else  may  have  thought  so,  Jackson 
certainly  held  that  opinion.  As  his  wont 
was,  he  saw  the  danger  and  the  villainy 
which  he  thought  himself  commissioned  to 
destroy  in  the  person  of  a  man  ;  and  that 
man  was  Henry  Clay.  Martin  Van  Buren 
was  to  succeed  Clay  as  Secretary  of  State  in 
the  new  Cabinet,  but  he  did  not  reach  Wash 
ington  until  after  the  4th  of  March.  Jack 
son  accordingly  sent  his  friend,  Colonel  Ham 
ilton,  of  New  York,  to  the  State  Department, 
ordering  him  to  take  charge  there  the  instant 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  119 

he  should  hear  the  gun  which  was  to  announce 
that  the  new  President  had  taken  the  oath 
of  office. 

Jackson  and  Clay  were,  in  fact,  the  lead 
ers  of  the  two  parties  into  which  the  old 
Republican  party  was  now  divided.  Their 
rise  to  leadership  meant  that  a  new  set  of 
public  men  and  a  new  set  of  questions  had 
come  to  the  front;  it  meant  a  more  thor 
oughgoing  experiment  of  democracy  than 
had  yet  been  tried  in  America.  Adams's 
administration  is  properly  considered  to  have 
been  the  last  of  one  series  and  Jackson's  the 
first  of  another.  Under  the  earlier  Presi 
dents,  national  affairs  were  committed  mainly 
to  a  few  trained  statesmen,  the  people  simply 
approving  or  disapproving  the  men  and  the 
measures  brought  before  them,  but  not  of 
themselves  putting  forward  candidates  for 
the  higher  offices  or  in  any  wise  initiating 
policies.  The  rule  of  the  people  was  thus  a 
passive  sort  of  rule,  a  rule  by  consent.  But 
with  the  wide  prevalence  of  manhood  suf 
frage,  and  the  prominence  of  domestic  ques 
tions,  —  of  questions  concerning  the  business 


120  ANDREW  JACKSON 

and  the  daily  life  of  the  Republic,  —  and 
with  the  disappearance  of  the  profound  ques 
tions  concerning  the  organization  of  the  gov 
ernment  and  the  nature  of  government  in 
general,  the  people  began  to  assert  them 
selves.  Under  Jackson  and  his  successors, 
they  made  themselves  felt  more  and  more  at 
Washington  ;  their  opinions  and  sentiments, 
their  likes  and  dislikes,  their  whims  and 
prejudices,  were  projected  into  their  gov 
ernment.  Henceforth,  public  men  were  to 
be  powerful  not  so  much  in  proportion  to 
their  knowledge  of  statecraft  as  in  propor 
tion  to  their  popularity.  They  must  repre 
sent  the  popular  will,  or  commend  them 
selves  and  their  policies  to  popular  favor. 
The  public  men  of  the  old  order,  like  Adams, 
might  be  wise  and  faithful,  but  they  lacked 
Clay's  and  Jackson's  sympathetic  under 
standing  of  the  common  people.  And  of 
the  two  new  leaders  Jackson  had  by  far 
the  stronger  hold  on  the  popular  mind  and 
heart.  The  people  had  sent  him  to  Wash 
ington  because  he  was  of  them  and  like 
them,  and  because  they  liked  him.  Both  he 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  121 

and  they  felt  that  he  was  their  President, 
and  he  held  himself  responsible  to  them 
only. 

It  seemed,  too,  that  with  the  new  ques 
tions  and  the  new  men  there  was  coming  a 
new  sort  of  politics.  Jackson  meant  to  serve 
the  people  faithfully,  but  he  entered  upon 
the  duties  of  his  great  office  in  the  spirit  of 
a  victorious  general.  The  sort  of  politics 
most  in  accord  with  his  feeling  was  the  sort 
of  politics  which  prevailed  in  New  York  and 
Pennsylvania.  Jackson  once  declared,  "  I 
am  not  a  politician,  but  if  I  were,  I  should 
be  a  New  York  politician."  Before  long,  a 
leading  New  York  politician,  Senator  Marcy, 
expressed  the  sentiment  of  his  fellows  when 
he  said,  "  To  the  victors  belong  the  spoils." 
That  was  a  sentiment  which  a  soldier  Pre 
sident  could  understand.  In  that  letter  to 
Monroe  which  Major  Lewis  wrote  for  him 
twelve  years  before,  and  which  won  him  votes, 
he  had  urged  that  partisan  considerations 
should  not  control  appointments ;  but  before 
he  had  been  President  a  year  he  removed 
more  men  from  office  than  all  his  predeces- 


122  ANDREW  JACKSON 

sors  had  removed  since  the  beginning  of  the 
government.  When  he  left  Washington,  the 
practice  of  removing  and  appointing  men  for 
political  reasons  was  so  firmly  established 
that  the  patient  work  of  reform  has  not  to 
this  day  destroyed  it.  That,  to  many  histo 
rians,  was  the  gravest  fault  of  Jackson's 
^  administration.  It  was,  however,  merely  New 
York  methods  applied  to  national  politics, 
and  it  was  a  perfectly  natural  outcome  of 
Jackson's  conviction  that  the  people  had  sent 
him  there  to  drive  out  the  men  who  had 
control  of  the  government. 

In  fact,  unless  we  understand  President 
Jackson  himself,  we  cannot  possibly  under 
stand  his  administration ;  for  President  Jack 
son,  though  he  was  now  somewhat  subdued 
in  manner,  and  "  By  the  Eternal "  was  not 
quite  so  often  on  his  lips,  was  still  Jackson 
of  the  duelling  pistol  and  Jackson  of  the 
sword ;  and  he  was  also  still  the  Jackson 
whom  Benton  saw  with  the  lamb  and  the 
child  between  his  knees.  All  men  were  still 
divided  for  him  into  friends  and  enemies. 
The  party  opposed  to  him  came  soon  to  call 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  123 

itself  the  National  Republican  Party,  and 
later  the  Whig  Party,  while  his  own  follow 
ers  were  called  Democratic  Republicans,  or 
Democrats.  But  to  Jackson  the  National 
Republicans  were  the  friends  of  Henry  Clay, 
as  the  Democrats  were  his  own  friends.  So, 
too,  of  the  great  questions  he  had  to  deal 
with.  In  every  case  he  was  fighting  not 
merely  a  policy  or  an  institution  but  a  man. 

For  a  time,  however,  his  arch-enemy,  Clay, 
disappeared  from  the  scene.  Until  the  au 
tumn  of  1831,  he  was  in  retirement  in  Ken 
tucky.  Jackson  had  the  field  to  himself, 
and  was  at  first  occupied  with  his  friends 
rather  than  his  enemies. 

Van  Buren,  as  Secretary  of  State,  was  the 
head  of  the  new  Cabinet.  The  other  mem 
bers  were  not  men  of  great  distinction.  They 
had,  however,  one  thing  in  common:  in  one 
way  or  another,  they  had  all  opposed  Mr. 
Clay.  On  other  points  they  differed.  Half 
of  them  were  friends  of  Calhoun,  and  wished 
to  see  him  President  after  Jackson.  They 
were  also  divided  into  married  men  and  a 
widower,  Mr.  Van  Buren  being  the  widower. 


124  ANDREW  JACKSON 

That,  as  things  turned  out,  was  a  very  im 
portant  division  indeed. 

Jackson  did  not  treat  his  Cabinet  as  other 
Presidents  had  treated  theirs.  He  had  a 
v  soldier's  idea  of  organization,  and  did  not 
think  it  necessary  to  consult  the  Cabinet 
members  about  all  the  measures  he  planned. 
He  treated  them  somewhat  as  a  general 
treats  his  inferior  officers,  though  with  sev 
eral  of  them,  especially  Van  Buren  and  Ea 
ton,  his  relations  were  very  cordial  and  inti 
mate.  When  he  wished  advice,  however,  he 
was  more  apt  to  seek  it  of  his  friend,  Major 
Lewis,  whom  he  had  persuaded  to  accept 
an  appointment,  and  who  lived  with  him  at 
the  White  House,  or  of  Isaac  Hill,  who 
had  come  to  Washington  after  fighting  the 
Adams  men  in  New  Hampshire,  or  of  Amos 
Kendall,  who  had  dared  to  oppose  Clay  in 
Kentucky,  or  of  General  Duff  Green,  editor 
of  "  The  Telegraph,"  the  Jackson  organ. 
These  men,  personal  friends  of  the  Presi 
dent,  came  to  be  called  the  "  Kitchen  Cabi 
net  ; "  and  at  least  three  of  the  four  were 
shrewd  enough  to  justify  any  President  in 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  125 

consulting  them.  Hill  and  Kendall  were 
both  New  England  men  by  birth,  and  had 
all  the  industry  and  sharpness  of  mind  pro 
verbially  characteristic  of  Yankees.  Even 
Major  Lewis  did  not  surpass  Kendall  in 
political  cleverness  and  far-sightedness ;  he 
was  a  "  little  whiffet  of  a  man,"  but  before 
long  the  opposition  learned  to  see  his  hand 
in  every  event  of  political  importance  any 
where  in  the  country.  If  a  Democratic  con 
vention  in  Maine  framed  a  resolution,  or  a 
newspaper  in  New  Orleans  changed  its  policy, 
men  were  ready  to  declare  that  it  was  Ken 
dall  who  pulled  the  wire.  Historians  are 
fond  of  saying  that  it  was  such  men  as  Ken 
dall  and  Lewis  who  really  ruled  the  country 
while  Jackson  was  President ;  and  it  is  true 
that  by  skilful  suggestions,  by  playing  upon 
his  likes  and  dislikes,  much  could  be  done 
with  him.  But  it  is  equally  true  that  when 
he  was  once  resolved  on  any  course  his  friends 
could  no  more  stop  him  than  his  enemies 
could.  A  clerk  in  the  State  Department 
won  his  favor  by  a  happy  use  of  the  phrase, 
"  I  take  the  responsibility,"  and  from  that 


126  ANDREW  JACKSON 

time  was  safe  even  against  the  displeasure  of 
Secretary  Van  Buren.  A  member  of  Con 
gress  began  a  successful  intrigue  for  office 
by  begging  for  his  father  the  pipe  which  the 
President  was  smoking,  ashes  and  all.  A 
clerk  in  the  War  Department  attracted  his 
attention  by  challenging  a  man  to  a  duel, 
and  so  started  himself  on  a  career  that  ended 
in  the  Senate.  Secretary  Van  Buren  called 
on  Peggy  Eaton  and  supplanted  Calhoun  as 
the  heir  apparent  to  the  presidency.  Jack 
son  in  good  humor  was  the  easiest  of  victims 
to  an  artful  intriguer ;  but,  unlike  the  weak 
kings  whom  scheming  ministers  have  shaped 
to  their  purposes,  he  could  not  be  stopped 
when  once  he  was  started. 

It  was  Peggy  Eaton  who  made  a  division 
between  the  married  men  and  the  widower 
of  the  Cabinet.  She  was  the  wife  of  Sena 
tor  Eaton,  who  was  now  Secretary  of  War, 
and  the  widow  of  a  naval  officer  named 
Timberlake.  Her  father  was  a  tavern- 
keeper  named  O'Neill,  and  both  Jackson 
and  Eaton  had  lived  at  his  tavern  when 
they  were  Senators,  and  Mrs.  O'Neill  had 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  127 

been  kind  to  Mrs.  Jackson.  The  O'Neills 
had  no  place  in  Washington  society,  and 
there  were  ugly  stories  about  the  conduct  of 
Mrs.  Timberlake  with  Senator  Eaton  before 
the  death  of  Timberlake,  who  killed  himself 
at  sea.  Washington  society  believed  these 
stories.  President  Jackson  refused  to  be 
lieve  them,  and  became  Mrs.  Eaton's  cham 
pion.  His  zeal  in  her  cause  knew  no 
bounds,  and  he  wished  his  secretaries  and 
their  wives  to  help  him.  But  the  Cabinet 
ladies  woidd  not  visit  or  receive  Mrs.  Eaton, 
and  their  husbands  refused  to  interfere. 
Calhoun,  the  Vice-President,  also  declined 
to  take  up  Mrs.  Eaton's  cause.  Mr.  Van 
Buren,  a  widower,  showed  the  lady  marked 
attention. 

For  once  in  his  life,  Andrew  Jackson  was 
defeated.  Creeks  and  Spaniards  and  Red 
coats  he  could  conquer,  but  the  ladies  of 
Washington  never  surrendered,  and  Peggy 
Eaton,  though  her  affairs  became  a  national 
question,  never  got  into  Washington  society. 
Jackson,  however,  did  not  forget  who  had 
been  his  friends  in  a  little  matter  any  more 


128  ANDREW  JACKSON 

than  if  it  had  been  the  greatest  affair  of 
state. 

It  was  already  a  question  whether  Cal- 
houn  or  Van  Buren  should  lead  the  Jackson 
party  at  the  end  of  the  one  term  which 
Jackson  had  declared  to  be  the  limit  of 
his  stay  in  the  White  House.  Calhoun's 
friends  in  the  Cabinet,  and  General  Duff 
Green,  of  "  The  Telegraph,"  were  active  in 
his  interest.  Van  Buren,  however,  was  con 
stantly  growing  in  favor  with  the  President. 
When  at  last  Jackson  discovered  that  Cal- 
houn,  as  a  member  of  Monroe's  Cabinet, 
had  wished  to  censure  him  for  his  conduct 
in  Florida,  he  and  the  Vice-President  broke 
forever.  Meantime,  a  great  public  question 
had  arisen  on  which  the  two  men  stood  out 
as  representatives  of  two  opposite  theories  of 
the  Union.  The  estrangement  begun  over 
Peggy  Eaton  widened  into  a  breach  be 
tween  a  State  and  the  United  States,  be 
tween  the  nullifier  of  the  laws  and  the 
defender  of  the  Union. 

For  the  pendulum  had  swung,  and  it  was 
no  longer  the  Federalist  merchants  of  New 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  129 

England,  but  the  planters  of  the  South,  and 
particularly  of  South  Carolina,  who  were 
discontent  with  the  policy  of  the  govern 
ment.  New  England  had  turned  to  manu 
factures  some  of  the  energy  she  had  formerly 
given  to  commerce  and  seafaring,  and  was 
now  in  favor  of  a  protective  tariff.  Web 
ster,  her  foremost  man  at  Washington,  had 
voted  against  the  tariff  of  1816,  but  had 
changed  his  mind  and  supported  a  higher 
tariff  in  1824,  and  a  still  higher  in  1828. 
The  planters  of  the  South  had  not  found  it 
easy  to  develop  manufactures  with  their 
slave  labor.  They  had  little  or  nothing, 
therefore,  to  protect  against  the  products  of 
European  countries.  On  the  contrary,  they 
exported  much  of  their  cotton  to  England, 
and  imported  from  England  and  other  coun 
tries  many  of  the  things  they  consumed. 
Accordingly,  they  were,  as  a  rule,  opposed 
to  the  whole  system  of  tariff  taxation,  and 
desired  free  trade.  Many  of  them  also  op 
posed  the  system  of  internal  improvements, 
both  on  constitutional  grounds  and  because 
they  felt  that  the  tariff  made  them  pay  more 


130  ANDREW  JACKSON 

than  their  share  of  the  expense  of  such  un 
dertakings. 

On  the  question  of  internal  improvements 
Jackson  soon  took  a  stand  entirely  pleasing 
to  the  opponents  of  the  system.  In  his  first 
message  to  Congress  he  declared  against  it, 
and  when  Congress  passed  a  bill  subscribing 
money  to  the  stock  of  the  Maysville  and 
Lexington  road,  one  of  the  chief  internal 
improvements  so  far  undertaken,  and  an 
enterprise  specially  favored  by  Clay,  he 
promptly  vetoed  it.  Other  such  measures 
he  vetoed  unless  it  was  clear  that  a  two- 
thirds  majority  in  each  House  would  pass 
them  over  his  veto.  He  preferred  that  the 
money  received  from  the  sale,  of  public  lands 
should  be  distributed  among  the  States,  be 
lieving  that  they,  instead  of  the  general 
government,  should  undertake  the  improve 
ments  necessary  to  the  development  of  the 
country. 

Jackson  had,  indeed,  great  respect  for  the 
rights  of  the  States  under  the  Constitution, 
and  warned  Congress  not  to  go  beyond  the 
powers  which  were  clearly  given  to  the  gen- 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  131    | 

eral  government.  The  State  of  Georgia  had  I 
long  been  discontent  because  the  Indians  1 
were  not  removed  from  her  borders,  and  the 
President  sympathized  strongly  with  her 
feeling.  As  soon  as  he  was  elected,  the 
Georgia  legislature  passed  an  act  dividing 
up  the  Cherokee  country  into  counties,  and 
extending  over  them  the  civil  laws  of  the 
State.  The  act  was  plainly  contrary  to  trea 
ties  between  the  Indians  and  the  Federal 
government,  but  the  President  refused  to  in 
terfere.  On  the  contrary,  he  withdrew  all 
United  States  troops  from  the  Indian  coun 
try,  and  left  the  State  to  deal  with  the  In 
dians  as  it  chose.  Later  on,  the  Supreme 
Court  of  the  United  States  decided  that  the 
Georgia  law  was  unconstitutional  because  it 
took  away  the  treaty  rights  of  the  Chero- 
kees.  "  John  Marshall  has  made  his  de 
cision,"  said  Jackson,  "now  let  him  enforce  1 
it."  The  President,  in  fact,  was  heartily  in  I 
favor  of  removing  the  Indians,  and  before 
he  went  out  of  office  the  last  of  the  Southern 
tribes  had  given  up  its  old  home  for  a  new 
one  in  the  West. 


132  ANDREW  JACKSON 

Jackson's  collision  with  Chief  Justice 
Marshall  over  this  question  had  very  far- 
reaching  effects,  which  historians  have  some 
what  neglected  in  their  study  of  the  conse 
quences  of  his  course  on  other  questions. 
No  statesman,  no  President,  had  done  so 
much  as  the  great  Chief  Justice  to  make 
the  general  government  strong  and  to  re 
strain  the  States.  Jackson,  disagreeing  with 
some  of  Marshall's  views,  never  lost  an  op 
portunity  to  put  on  the  bench  a  man  of  his 
own  way  of  thinking.  The  result  was  that 
many  years  later,  when,  in  a  great  crisis,  the 
supporters  of  the  national  government  and 
the  leaders  of  States  about  to  break  away 
from  the  Union  looked  to  the  Supreme 
Court  to  decide  between  them,  the  voice 
that  came  from  the  august  tribunal  spoke 
words  which  Marshall  and  Story  would  never 
have  uttered,  but  which  the  champions  of 
the  States  heard  with  delight. 

On  these  important  questions,  then,  Presi 
dent  Jackson  acted  like  an  extreme  Jeffer- 
sonian  Democrat.  But  the  South  Carolin 
ians  soon  found  that  if  he  was  ready  to  keep 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  133 

the  general  government  from  interfering  with 
any  right  that  could  reasonably  be  claimed 
for  a  State,  he  was  equally  ready  to  stand 
up  for  the  Union  when  he  thought  a  State 
was  going  too  far. 

He  had  nothing  to  do  with  the  tariff  of 
1828.  In  his  first  message  he  suggested  that 
some  modifications  of  it  were  desirable,  and 
pointed  out  that  the  public  debt  would  soon 
be  paid,  and  it  would  be  advisable  to  reduce 
certain  of  the  duties.  But  modification  was 
too  mild  a  word  to  suit  the  South  Caroli 
nians.  The  law  was  the  outcome  of  the 
clamor  of  many  selfish  interests,  and  Con 
gressmen  opposed  altogether  to  protection 
had  helped  to  make  it  as  bad  as  possible, 
hoping  that  it  might  in  the  end  be  defeated. 
AVhen  it  passed,  the  South  Carolina  legisla 
ture  vigorously  protested,  and  began  at  once 
to  debate  about  the  best  plan  of  resistance. 
The  plan  finally  preferred  was  for  the  State 
to  declare  the  law  unconstitutional,  and 
therefore  null  and  void,  and  call  on  other 
States  to  join  in  the  declaration.  If  the 
national  government  tried  to  enforce  the  law 


134  ANDREW  JACKSON 

in  South  Carolina,  she  would  protect  her 
citizens,  and  as  the  final  resort  withdraw 
from  the  Union.  The  plan  was  first  placed 
before  the  American  people  in  an  "  Exposi 
tion  and  Protest  "  adopted  by  the  South 
Carolina  legislature  in  1828 ;  and  the  real 
author  of  that  famous  document,  though  the 
fact  was  not  then  known,  was  the  Vice-Presi- 
dent,  Calhoun.  The  associate  of  Clay  in 
those  acts  which  had  made  a  beginning  of 
internal  improvements  and  of  protection, 
long  a  statesman  of  the  strong-government 
school,  Calhoun  had  been  led  by  the  distress 
and  discontent  of  his  own  people  to  examine 
the  Constitution  again,  "  in  order,"  as  he 
said  afterwards,  "  to  ascertain  fully  the  na 
ture  and  character  of  our  political  system," 
and  had  now  come  to  a  change  of  views. 

The  nullification  doctrine  came  before 
Congress  in  the  whiter  of  1829-30,  and  was 
debated  in  the  most  famous  of  American 
debates.  Clay  was  not  there  to  speak  for 
his  tariff  system,  but  a  greater  orator  than 
Clay  took  up  the  challenge.  In  the  greatest 
of  all  American  orations  since  Patrick  Henry 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  135 

spoke  for  liberty,  Webster  spoke  for  union 
and  liberty,  and  Americans  will  never  for 
get  his  words  until  liberty  and  union  are 
alike  destroyed.  Jackson  was  the  last  man 
in  the  country  to  miss  their  force.  No  orator 
himself,  he  yet  knew  how  to  give  words  the 
power  of  a  promised  or  a  threatened  deed. 
Not  long  after  the  debate,  there  was  a  public 
dinner  of  the  States'-Rights  men  in  Wash 
ington  to  celebrate  Jefferson's  birthday. 
Jackson  did  not  attend,  but  he  sent  a  toast, 
and  probably  the  seven  words  of  his  toast 
were  more  confounding  to  the  nullifiers  than 
all  the  stately  paragraphs  of  Webster's  ora 
tion.  It  was :  "  Our  Federal  Union :  it  must 
be  preserved."  Calhoun's  toast  was :  "  The 
Union,  —  next  to  our  liberties  the  most 
dear,"  —  and  Jackson,  who  was  just  learning 
that  he  had  been  mistaken  about  Calhoun  in 
1818,  began  now  to  see  clearly  that  the  great 
South  Carolinian  was  in  sympathy  with  the 
nullifiers.  Many  South  Carolinians,  how 
ever,  were  still  hoping  that  the  President 
would  not  take  any  active  measures  to  defeat 
their  plan.  Some  of  them  went  on  hoping 


136  ANDREW  JACKSON 

until  the  Fourth  of  July,  1831,  when  there 
was  read,  at  a  public  dinner  of  Union  men 
at  Charleston,  a  letter  from  Jackson  which 
left  no  doubt  of  what  he  meant  to  do  if  they 
kept  on.  He  was  going  to  enforce  the  laws 
and  preserve  the  Union. 

Having  by  this  time  broken  utterly  with 
Calhoun,  he  desired  to  rid  himself  of  those 
cabinet  members  who  were  Calhoun' s  friends, 
and  to  that  end  took  the  bold  and  unexam 
pled  step  of  changing  his  cabinet  entirely,  — 
only  Barry,  the  postmaster-general,  being 
kept  in  office.  Van  Buren  fell  readily  into 
the  plan,  gave  up  his  portfolio,  and  was  at 
once  appointed  minister  to  Great  Britain. 
Edward  Livingston  took  his  place.  A 
change  in  the  "Kitchen  Cabinet"  followed. 
General  Duff  Green  would  not  desert  Cal 
houn,  and  so  "  The  Telegraph  "  ceased  to  be 
the  organ  of  the  administration.  Instead, 
Francis  P.  Blair,  of  Kentucky,  who,  like 
Amos  Kendall,  had  been  first  the  friend  and 
then  the  enemy  of  Clay,  was  called  to  Wash 
ington,  and  set  up  "  The  Globe,"  which  soon 
became  a  power  for  Jackson.  Nor  were 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  137 

these  the  only  consequences  of  the  break 
with  Calhoun.  Jackson  and  his  closest 
friends  were  by  this  time  bent  on  making 
Van  Buren,  instead  of  Calhoun,  President 
after  Jackson,  but  were  doubtful  of  their 
ability  to  accomplish  it  at  the  next  election. 
The  President  was  therefore  persuaded  to 
run  again.  The  Democrats  in  the  legisla 
ture  of  Pennsylvania,  acting  on  a  hint  from 
Lewis,  sent  him  an  address  urging  him  to 
stand.  If  for  a  time  he  hesitated,  he  ceased 
to  hesitate  when  it  became  apparent  that 
Clay  was  going  to  be  the  candidate  of  the 
National  Republicans.  Clay,  yielding  to 
the  appeals  of  his  party  friends,  reappeared 
in  the  Senate  at  the  opening  of  Congress  in 
December,  1831,  and  now  the  duel  between 
the  two  great  party  leaders  grew  fiercer  than 
ever. 

Clay  returned  to  the  Senate  to  find  his 
tariff  policy  attacked  by  the  nullifiers,  his 
internal  improvements  policy  blocked  by  the 
President's  vetoes,  and  still  a  third  policy 
which  he  and  his  party  firmly  supported  vig 
orously  attacked  by  the  terrible  man  in  the 


138  ANDREW  JACKSON 

White  House.  The  National  Bank  was  in 
danger.  Its  charter  expired  in  1836,  and 
the  President  in  both  his  annual  messages 
had  gravely  questioned  the  wisdom  of  grant 
ing  another.  He  questioned  the  constitution 
ality  of  setting  up  such  an  institution,  and 
he  questioned  the  value  and  safety  of  the 
Bank  as  it  existed.  December  12, 1831,  the 
National  Republicans,  assembled  in  their 
first  national  convention  at  Baltimore,  nomi 
nated  Clay  for  President,  and  called  011  the 
people  to  defeat  Andrew  Jackson  in  order 
to  save  the  Bank.  Jackson  dauntlessly  ac 
cepted  the  issue  and  gave  the  country  to 
understand  that  either  he  or  the  Bank  must 
go  to  the  wall.  For  the  time,  even  Calhoun 
and  the  nullifiers  yielded  the  first  place 
among  his  enemies  to  Clay,  Biddle,  and  the 
Bank. 

Biddle  was  president  of  the  Bank,  a  hand 
some,  accomplished  man,  a  graceful  writer, 
and  a  clever,  though  not  always  a  safe  finan 
cier.  His  ready  pen  first  brought  him  into 
disfavor.  Isaac  Hill  and  Levi  Woodbury, 
the  Democratic  Senators  from  New  Hamp- 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  139 

sliire,  made  complaints  of  Jeremiah  Mason, 
an  old  Federalist,  who  was  president  of  the 
Branch  Bank  at  Portsmouth.  Their  charges 
were  various,  but  they  and  others  gave  Jack 
son  the  idea  that  the  Branch  Bank  in  New 
Hampshire  had  used  its  power  to  oppose  his 
friends  and  to  help  the  Adams  men.  Biddle 
was  called  on  to  investigate.  He  did  so,  and 
defended  Mason  against  all  the  charges.  A 
long  correspondence  ensued,  and  Biddle  went 
from  Philadelphia,  where  the  head  Bank  was, 
and  made  a  visit  to  Portsmouth.  His  letters 
to  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  were  cour 
teous,  well  written,  but  also  defiant.  It  was 
the  Jackson  men,  he  said,  who  were  trying 
to  draw  the  Bank  into  politics,  and  the  Bank 
had  constantly  refused  to  go  into  politics  in 
any  way.  He  made  out  a  very  good  case 
indeed,  but  the  longer  the  correspondence 
lasted  the  stronger  grew  Jackson's  convic 
tion  that  the  Bank  was  in  politics,  that  it  was 
fighting  him,  that  it  was  corrupt,  that  it  was 
dangerous  to  the  liberties  of  the  plain  people 
who  had  sent  him  to  the  White  House. 
Congress  took  up  the  matter,  and  committees 


140  ANDREW  JACKSON 

of  both  Houses  reported  in  favor  of  the  Bank. 
The  Supreme  Court  had  already  decided  that 
the  act  establishing  it  was  constitutional. 

Clay  boldly  determined  to  force  the  fight 
ing  both  on  the  tariff  and  on  the  Bank. 
The  great  measures  of  the  Congress  of 
1831-2  were  a  new  tariff  law  and  a  new 
Bank  charter.  The  public  debt  was  now 
nearly  extinguished,  and  it  was  clearly  ad 
visable  to  reduce  the  revenue ;  but  Clay  and 
his  followers  made  the  reductions  almost  en 
tirely  on  articles  not  produced  in  America, 
and  so,  in  defiance  of  the  nullifiers,  made  the 
new  tariff  as  protective  as  the  old.  Jackson 
had  gradually  given  up  most  of  his  protec 
tion  ideas,  and  so  the  tariff  did  not  please 
him.  Clay,  in  fact,  declared  that  for  his 
"American  system,"  as  he  called  it,  "he 
would  defy  the  South,  the  President,  and  the 
Devil."  Jackson  was  further  defied  by  the 
Senate  when  it  refused  to  confirm  the  nomi 
nation  of  Van  Buren  to  be  minister  to  Great 
Britain.  The  struggle  raged  through  the 
whole  session.  Benton  sturdily  defended 
the  President ;  Clay,  Webster,  and  Calhoun 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  141 

were  all,  in  one  way  or  another,  against  him. 
It  was  a  great  session  for  the  orators,  and  so, 
far  as  Congress  was  concerned  Clay  had  his 
way.  But  Lewis  and  Kendall  were  not  idle  ; 
they  were  working  not  on  Congress  but  on 
the  people.  In  May,  the  Democrats  nomi 
nated  Jackson  for  President  and  Van  Bureii 
for  Vice-President.  In  July,  Congress  fin 
ished  its  work  with  the  Bank  charter,  and 
Jackson  promptly  answered  with  a  veto,  and 
so  the  two  parties  went  to  the  country. 

Jackson  went  into  the  campaign  with  an 
advantage  drawn  from  his  successful  conduct 
of  two  foreign  negotiations.  His  adminis 
tration  had  secured  from  England  an  agree 
ment  by  which  the  trade  with  the  West 
Indies,  closed  to  Americans  ever  since  the 
Revolution,  was  opened  again,  and  from 
France  a  promise  to  pay  large  claims  for 
spoliations  on  American  commerce  which 
had  been  presented  many  times  before.  He 
was  also  undoubtedly  supported  by  the  great 
majority  of  the  people  in  the  stand  he  took 
against  the  nullifiers.  What  the  people 
would  decide  about  the  tariff  was  doubtful ; 


142  ANDREW  JACKSON 

but  as  between  a  system,  even  though  it  were 
called  the  American  system,  and  an  old  hero, 
the  Democrats  were  not  afraid  of  the  peo 
ple's  choice.  The  great  fight  was  over  the 
Bank,  and  on  that  question  Jackson  was  sup 
ported  by  the  prejudices  of  the  poor,  who 
thought  of  the  Bank  merely  as  a  rich  men's 
institution,  by  the  fears  of  the  ignorant,  who 
believed  the  Bank  to  be  a  mysterious  and 
monstrous  affair,  and  by  the  instinct  of  lib 
erty  in  many  others,  who,  though  they  did 
not  believe  the  charges  against  Biddle,  did 
feel  that  there  was  danger  in  so  powerful  a 
financial  agency  so  closely  connected  with 
the  government. 

Moreover,  the  opposition  was  divided.  A 
party  bitterly  opposed  to  Free  Masonry  had 
sprung  into  existence,  and  Jackson  was  a 
Mason.  But  the  Anti-Masons,  instead  of 
supporting  Clay,  nominated  a  third  candi 
date.  South  Carolina  threw  her  votes  away 
on  a  fourth. 

Jackson  got  219  electoral  votes  to  49  for 
Clay,  11  for  Floyd,  the  nullification  candi 
date,  and  seven  for  Wirt,  the  Anti-Mason 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  143 

candidate.  His  popular  vote  was  more  than 
twice  Clay's,  and  he  actually  carried  the  New 
England  States  of  Maine  and  New  Hamp 
shire.  If,  during  his  first  term,  he  exer 
cised  his  great  office  like  a  general,  he  en 
tered  upon  the  second  with  even  a  firmer 
belief  that  he  ought  to  have  his  way  in  all 
things.  The  people  had  given  an  answer  to 
Clay  and  Biddle  and  Calhoun  and  Marshall ; 
to  the  corrupters  of  the  government  and  the 
enemies  of  the  President;  to  the  nullifiers 
of  the  law  and  the  slanderers  of  Peggy 
Eaton.  He  understood  his  overwhelming 
victory  as  the  people's  warrant  to  go  on  with 
all  he  had  begun. 

But  neither  the  nullifiers  nor  the  Bank 
were  willing  to  give  up.  In  November,  1832, 
a  South  Carolina  convention  passed  an  ordi 
nance,  to  go  into  effect  February  1,  1833, 
nullifying  the  tariff  law,  and  took  measures 
to  defend  its  action  by  force.  Jackson 
promptly  sent  Winfield  Scott  to  South  Caro 
lina  to  make  ready  for  fighting,  employed  a 
confidential  agent  to  organize  the  Union  men 
in  the  State,  and  called  on  Edward  Living- 


144  ANDREW  JACKSON 

ston  to  help  him  with  an  address  to  his  mis 
guided  countrymen.  The  pen  of  Livingston 
and  the  spirit  of  Jackson,  working  together, 
made  the  Nullification  Proclamation  a  great 
state  paper.  It  was  a  high-minded  appeal 
to  the  second  thought  and  the  better  nature 
of  the  Carolinians  ;  an  able  statement  of  the 
national  character  of  the  government ;  a  firm 
defiance  to  all  enemies  of  the  Union.  It 
was  the  most  popular  act  of  the  administra 
tion,  and  brought  to  its  support  men  who 
had  never  supported  it  before.  Benton  and 
Webster  joined  hands  ;  even  Clay,  who,  like 
Jackson,  loved  his  country  with  his  whole 
heart,  supported  the  President.  Calhoun, 
alone  of  all  his  famous  contemporaries,  stood 
out  against  him.  He  left  the  Vice-Presi 
dent's  seat,  came  down  upon  the  floor  as  a 
Senator,  and  defended  nullification  against 
all  the  famous  orators  who  crowded  to  assail 
it. 

The  President  called  on  Congress  to  pro 
vide  the  means  to  enforce  the  law,  and  a  so- 
called  force  bill  was  introduced.  The  Caro 
linians  were  defiant,  and  the  country  seemed 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  145 

on  the  verge  of  civil  war ;  but  Clay,  by  the 
second  of  his  famous  compromises,  avoided 
the  struggle.  A  new  tariff  law,  providing 
for  a  gradual  reduction  of  duties,  was  passed 
along  with  the  force  bill.  The  Carolinians 
chose  the  olive  branch  instead  of  the  sword. 
The  nullifiers  first  postponed  and  then  re 
pealed  their  ordinance. 

Jackson  was  a  national  hero  as  he  had 
never  been  before.  In  the  summer  of  1833, 
he  made  a  journey  to  the  Northeast,  and  U 
even  New  England  made  him  welcome. 
Harvard  College  made  him  a  Doctor  of 
Laws.  As  he  rode  through  the  streets  of 
Boston,  a  merchant  of  Federalist  traditions, 
who  had  closed  his  windows  to  show  his  prin 
ciples,  peeped  through,  and  Jackson's  bear 
ing  so  touched  him  that  he  sent  a  child  to 
wave  the  old  gentleman  a  handkerchief. 
Andy  of  the  Waxhaws  was  at  the  summit 
of  his  career.  No  other  American  could 
rival  him  in  popularity ;  no  other  American 
had  ever  had  such  power  over  his  country 
men  since  Washington  frowned  at  the  whis 
per  that  he  might  be  a  king. 


146  ANDREW  JACKSON 

But  the  great  man  was  only  a  man,  after 
all.  He  was  in  wretched  health  throughout 
his  first  term,  and  at  times  it  did  not  seem 
that  he  could  possibly  live  through  it.  His 
old  wounds  troubled  him,  and  one  day  he 
laid  bare  his  shoulder,  gripped  his  cane  with 
his  free  hand,  and  a  surgeon  cut  out  the  ball 
from  Jesse  Benton's  pistol.  He  was  too  ill 
to  finish  his  New  England  tour,  and  has 
tened  back  to  Washington. 

But  his  opponents  had  little  reason  to 
rejoice  in  his  illness.  The  summer  was  not 
spent  before  he  had  made  up  his  'mind  to  do 
the  most  daring  act  of  his  public  life.  He 
had  vetoed  the  Bank's  new  charter,  but  the 
Bank  itself  was  not  destroyed.  The  public 
funds  were  still  in  its  keeping ;  its  power  in 
the  business  world  was  as  great  as  ever.  He 
believed,  moreover,  that  Biddle  was  using 
money  freely  to  fight  him,  and  would  sooner 
or  later  get  what  he  wanted  from  Congress. 
He  prepared,  therefore,  to  crush  the  Bank  by 
withdrawing  the  deposits  of  public  money 
and  giving  them  into  the  keeping  of  other 
banks  throughout  the  country.  Blair,  in 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  147 

"  The  Globe,"  set  to  work  to  convince  the 
people  that  the  Bank  was  not  sound,  and 
that  the  public  funds  were  unsafe.  Kendall 
was  sent  about  the  country  to  examine  other 
banks.  Congress  voted  against  removing 
the  deposits,  but  the  old  charter  authorized 
the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  to  do  it,  and 
the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  was  now  Wil 
liam  Duane,  of  Philadelphia,  a  son  of  Jack 
son's  early  friend.  There  had  been  some 
changes  in  the  cabinet  after  the  second 
inauguration,  Livingston  had  been  appointed 
minister  to  France,  the  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury  transferred  to  the  State  Depart 
ment,  and  Duane  called  to  the  Treasury. 

But  Duane  would  not  fall  in  with  the 
President's  plan.  He  did  not  believe  the 
deposits  were  in  danger,  and  refused  to 
sign  an  order  for  removal.  Jackson  argued, 
then  grew  angry,  and  finally  dismissed  him. 
Duane  defended  his  course  ably.  Lewis  also 
advised  against  removal.  Benton  favored  it, 
but  in  this  he  was  almost  alone  among  the 
leading  public  men.  Jackson,  however,  was 
started,  and  he  could  not  be  stopped.  Roger 


148  ANDREW  JACKSON 

B.  Taney,  of  Maryland,  the  Attorney-Gen 
eral,  was  made  Secretary  of  the  Treasury, 
and  on  September  26, 1833,  three  days  after 
Duane's  dismissal,  the  order  was  signed  and 
a  series  of  changes  began  that  did  not  end 
until  the  whole  financial  system  of  the  coun 
try  was  changed. 

When  Congress  met,  it  proved  to  be, 
everything  considered,  probably  the  ablest 
legislature  ever  assembled  in  America. 
There  were  brilliant  men  of  a  new  genera 
tion  in  the  lower  House,  and  Adams  also 
was  there.  In  the  Senate,  the  great  three 
were  still  supreme,  and  were  now  united 
against  the  President.  The  debates  were 
long  and  furious.  A  panic  throughout  the 
country  added  to  the  excitement.  Clay  led 
the  attack,  Calhoun  and  Webster  supported 
it ;  Benton  bore  the  brunt  of  it.  In  the 
House,  the  Jackson  men  had  a  majority ;  in 
the  Senate,  the  opposition.  The  Senate 
refused  to  confirm  the  nomination  of  Taney 
to  be  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  and  voted 
that  the  President  had  taken  upon  himself 
powers  not  given  by  the  Constitution.  The 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  149 

President  sent  in  a  fiery  remonstrance,  and 
the  Senate  voted  not  to  receive  it.  Benton 
at  once  moved  that  the  resolution  of  censure 
be  expunged  from  the  record,  and  declared 
he  would  keep  that  motion  before  the  Senate 
until  the  people,  by  choosing  a  Jackson  ma 
jority  of  Senators,  should  force  it  through. 

The  session  closed  with  nothing  done  for 
the  Bank,  and  nothing  ever  was  done  for  it. 
When  its  charter  expired  in  1836,  it  got  an 
other  from  Pennsylvania,  and  kept  going  for 
some  years.  But  Jackson  had  given  it  a 
deathblow.  It  fell  into  dangerous  finan 
cial  practices,  failed,  started  again,  failed  a 
second  time,  staggered  to  its  feet  once  more, 
and  then  went  down  in  utter  ruin  and  dis 
grace. 

Its  ruin  was  not  accomplished  without 
great  disturbance  to  financial  conditions. 
The 'country  had  been  prosperous  a  long 
time.  Money  had  been  plentiful.  Specu 
lation  had  been  the  order  of  the  day.  The 
"  pet  banks,"  chosen  to  be  the  depositories  of 
the  government  money,  were  badly  managed. 
The  surplus,  distributed  among  the  States, 


150  ANDREW  JACKSON 

strengthened  the  impulse  to  wild  specula 
tion.  Paper  money  was  too  plentiful.  A 
dangerous  financial  condition  prevailed,  into 
whose  causes  and  consequences  we  cannot 
here  inquire.  That  and  many  other  aspects 
of  Jackson's  administration  can  be  satisfac 
torily  treated  only  at  considerable  length. 
Jackson  himself  attributed  all  the  trouble 
to  Biddle  and  Clay;  Biddle,  he  declared, 
was  trying  to  ruin  the  country  for  revenge. 
The  President  even  suspected  Clay  of  set 
ting  on  an  insane  person  who  attempted 
his  life.  He  took  no  measures  of  a  na 
ture  to  restore  health  to  business  until  near 
the  end  of  his  term.  Then,  acting  as 
usual  on  his  own  responsibility,  he  issued 
a  circular  commonly  called  the  "  Specie  Cir 
cular,"  requiring  payments  for  public  lands, 
which  had  formerly  been  made  in  bank 
paper,  to  be  made  in  coin.  That  was  like 
the  thunderclap  which  precedes  the  storm  : 
but  the  storm  broke  on  his  successor,  not 
on  him. 

For  a  time  it  seemed  as  if  he  might  also 
bequeath   to   his   successor   a  foreign  war. 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  151 

France  had  agreed  to  pay  the  spoliation 
claims,  but  the  French  Chambers  failed  to 
appropriate  the  money.  Louis  Philippe,  the 
king,  suggested  to  Livingston,  the  Ameri 
can  Minister,  that  a  stronger  tone  from  the 
United  States  might  stir  the  Chambers  to 
action.  Jackson  was  the  last  man  in  the 
world  to  hurt  a  cause  by  taking  too  mild  a 
tone.  In  his  message  of  1834  to  Congress, 
he  took  a  tone  so  strong  that  it  made  the 
French  Chambers  too  angry  to  pay.  There 
upon,  he  suggested  reprisals.  The  House, 
led  by  Adams,  who  never  fell  behind  Jack 
son  on  a  question  of  foreign  relations,  sus 
tained  the  President.  The  Senate  took  no 
action.  The  French  Chambers  finally  passed 
an  appropriation,  but  with  a  proviso  that  no 
money  should  be  paid  until  satisfactory  ex 
planations  of  the  President's  message  were 
received.  Jackson  had  no  notion  of  apolo 
gizing,  and  feeling  was  rising  in  both  coun 
tries.  Diplomatic  relations  were  broken  off, 
and  war  was  apparently  very  close,  when,  in 
the  winter  of  1835-6,  England  offered  to 
mediate.  An  expression  in  Jackson's  mes- 


152  ANDREW  JACKSON 

sage  of  1835,  not  meant  as  an  apology,  was 
somehow  construed  as  such  by  the  French 
ministry,  and  France  agreed  to  pay. 

The  final  settlement  came  at  the  very  end 
of  Jackson's  administration.  The  presiden 
tial  election  of  1836  had  fulfilled  his  wish 
that  Van  Buren  should  be  his  successor.  In 
January,  1837,  the  resolution  of  censure  was 
solemnly  expunged  from  the  records  of  the 
Senate.  That  body  being  now  controlled  by 
his  friends,  and  his  enemy,  John  Marshall, 
being  dead,  he  named  Taney  Chief  Jus 
tice,  and  the  nomination  was  confirmed.  He 
issued  a  farewell  address  to  the  people,  after 
the  manner  of  Washington,  and  stood,  a 
white-haired,  impressive  figure,  to  watch  the 
inauguration- of  Van  Buren;  then  he  jour 
neyed  home  to  The  Hermitage  to  receive  his 
last  glorious  welcome  from  his  neighbors. 

It  was  the  most  triumphant  home-coming 
of  them  all.  He  had  beaten  all  his  enemies. 
Clay,  wearied  out  with  politics,  was  again  in 
retirement ;  Adams,  whom  he  found  a  Presi 
dent,  was  leading  a  minority  of  representa 
tives  in  a  new  sectional  struggle,  the  fight 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  153 

against  slavery ;  Calhoun,  whom  he  found 
but  one  step  from  the  presidency,  was  a 
gloomy  and  tragical  figure,  the  Ishmael  of 
American  politics.  As  for  his  friends,  he 
left  them  in  power  everywhere,  —  in  con 
gress,  on  the  bench,  in  the  White  House. 
To  friends  and  enemies  he  had  been  like 
fate. 

There  was  left  for  him  a  peaceful  old  age, 
and  a  calm  and  happy  deathbed.  Neigh 
bors,  political  associates,  old  comrades,  fa 
mous  foreigners,  visited  The  Hermitage  to 
see  the  man  who  had  played  so  great  a  part 
in  history.  Like  Jefferson  at  Monticello,  he 
guided  with  his  counsel  the  party  he  had 
led.  The  long  struggle  over  slavery  was 
now  begun,  and  soon  the  annexation  of  Texas 
took  the  first  place  among  public  questions. 
The  old  man  had  encouraged  Houston  to  go 
to  Texas,  and  had  done  all  he  could,  and 
more  than  any  other  President  would  have 
dared,  to  forward  the  movement  for  inde 
pendence.  Now  that  Texas  was  ready  to 
come  into  the  Union,  he  heartily  favored 
annexation.  In  1844,  Clay  and  Polk  were 


154  ANDREW  JACKSON 

candidates  for  the  presidency,  and  Jackson's 
influence,  still  a  power,  was  freely  exerted 
for  Polk  and  annexation.  It  was  as  if  Clay, 
now  an  old  man  also,  were  once  more  about 
to  lift  the  cup  to  his  lips,  and  the  relentless 
hand  of  Andrew  Jackson  dashed  it  to  the 
ground. 

Yet  Andrew  Jackson  declared  before  he 
died  that  he  forgave  all  his  enemies.  He 
had  promised  his  wife,  whose  picture  he 
wore  in  a  great  locket  next  his  heart,  whose 
Bible  he  read  every  day  at  the  White  House, 
that  when  he  should  be  free  of  politics  he 
would  join  himself  to  the  church  ;  if,  he  said, 
he  made  a  profession  while  he  was  still  be 
fore  the  people,  his  enemies  would  accuse 
him  of  hypocrisy.  He  kept  his  word.  Trem 
bling  and  weeping,  he  stood  before  the  altar 
in  the  tiny  church  he  had  built  for  her  and 
took  the  vows  of  a  Christian.  It  had  been 
hard  for  him  to  say  that  he  forgave  his  ene 
mies  ;  hardest  of  all,  to  say  that  he  forgave 
those  who  had  attacked  him  while  he  was 
serving  his  country  in  the  field.  But  after 
a  long  pause  he  told  the  minister  he  thought 
he  could  forgive  even  them. 


THE  WHITE  HOUSE  155 

June  8,  1845,  in  his  seventy-ninth  year, 
he  died.  His  last  words  to  those  about  him 
bade  them  meet  him  in  heaven. 

What  is  the  rightful  place  in  history  of 
the  fiery  horseman  in  front  of  the  White 
House  ?  The  reader  must  answer  for  himself 
when  he  has  studied  for  himself  all  the  great 
questions  Jackson  dealt  with.  Such  a  study 
will  surely  show  that  he  made  many  mis 
takes,  did  much  injustice  to  men,  espoused 
many  causes  without  waiting  to  hear  the 
other  side,  was  often  bitter,  violent,  even 
cruel.  It  will  show  how  ignorant  he  was  on 
many  subjects,  how  prejudiced  on  others.  It 
will  show  him  in  contact  with  men  who  sur 
passed  him  in  wisdom,  in  knowledge,  in  fair 
ness  of  mind.  It  will  deny  him  a  place 
among  those  calm,  just  great  men  who  can 
see  both  sides  and  yet  strive  ardently  for 
the  right  side. 

But  the  longest  inquiry  will  not  discover 
another  American  of  his  times  who  had  in 
such  ample  measure  the  gifts  of  courage  and 
will.  Many  had  fewer  faults,  many  superior 


156  ANDREW  JACKSON 

talents,  but  none  so  great  a  spirit.  He  was 
the  man  who  had  his  way.  He  was  the 
American  whose  simple  virtues  his  country 
men  most  clearly  understood,  whose  tres 
passes  they  most  readily  forgave  ;  and  until 
Americans  are  altogether  changed,  many, 
like  the  Democrats  of  the  'Twenties  and 
'Thirties,  will  still  "vote  for  Jackson,"  - 
for  the  poor  boy  who  fought  his  way,  step 
by  step,  to  the  highest  station ;  for  the  sol 
dier  who  always  went  to  meet  the  enemy 
at  the  gate;  for  the  President  who  never 
shirked  a  responsibility ;  for  the  man  who 
would  not  think  evil  of  a  woman  or  speak 
harshly  to  a  child.  Education,  and  training 
in  statecraft,  would  have  saved  him  many 
errors ;  culture  might  have  softened  the 
fierceness  of  his  nature.  But  untrained, 
uncultivated,  imperfect  as  he  was,  not  one 
of  his  great  contemporaries  had  so  good  a 
right  to  stand  for  American  character. 


14  DAY  USE 

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